Case Study

Transforming Purina’s Retail Innovation Center Into an Immersive Pet-Owner Journey

LAB9 is Purina’s flagship innovation space, a forward-looking environment where major retailers explore the future of pet care and how Purina is driving category growth. It is designed to spark inspiration and enable hands-on collaboration, helping retail partners co-create what’s next for the category.

ROLE

CLIENT

TIMELINE

OUTCOME

Lead Experience Designer
UX, Motion, 3D

Nestlé Purina

2022 — 2025
Ongoing Partnership

+53% Retailer Engagements
Year-Over-Year Growth

ROLE

Experience Designer
UX, Motion, Strategy

CLIENT

Nestlé Purina

TIMELINE

2022 — 2025
Ongoing Partnership

OUTCOME

+53% Retailer Engagements
Year-Over-Year Growth

Challenge

Understanding the Gap in Purina’s Retail Innovation Center Experience

The physical experience had stagnated, becoming a presentation-led showroom suffering from dense frameworks and disconnected content. Focused heavily on what Purina wanted to broadcast rather than what retailers needed to discover, the journey left visitors with no clear through-line connecting innovations to real pet owner needs.

My role was to weave a digital nervous system into this physical space. Collaborating with the strategy team, creative directors, and environments designers, I translated high-level insights into a cohesive digital layer. I focused on creating a modular system that moved beyond static displays, resulting in a self-guided, intuitive journey that Purina teams could easily update to adapt to each engagement.

Original innovation center environment was framework-heavy and unclear in purpose.

Challenge

Understanding the Gap in Purina’s Retail Innovation Center Experience

Original innovation center environment was framework-heavy and unclear in purpose.

Strategy

Synthesizing the Vision

Working with the strategy team, I helped audit the existing content and stakeholder needs. We identified three core pillars from our foundational insights for the new system:

Non-Linear: Moving away from rigid presentations.
Empathy-First: Focusing on the shopper’s mindset, not just the product specs.
Real-Time: Tools that encourage discussion, not just observation.

Design Approach

Reframing the Experience Around Pet Owner Journeys

We rebuilt the primary LAB9 Experience around narrative-driven Pet Owner Journeys, shifting the focus from product presentations to real behaviors, motivations, and decision-making. These principles shaped the core of our design approach:

Human-centered storytelling grounded in real pet owner insights.
Modular content paths that retailers can explore in any order.
A flexible CMS system that lets teams effortlessly tailor content to each retailer they meet with.

UX System Architecture

Building a Story-Led System for a Complex, Ever-Changing Space

LAB9’s stations varied wildly in hardware, layouts, and narrative intent. To unify them, I designed a digital system that flexes to any context—responsive templates, configurable states, and a CMS to adapt to the retailer conversation happening on any given day.

By grounding everything in a consistent story structure, the system translated physical constraints into digital clarity. The result: an experience that feels cohesive across the entire space while still remaining flexible enough to evolve.

Component Toolkit

A modular foundation helped bring the LAB9 brand into the digital environment. I developed a scalable library of components and templates, allowing us to build new screens and narratives quickly while preserving structure and intention.

Component Toolkit

Unified Visual Language Across Varied Displays

Regardless of hardware or screen size, every station shares a consistent UI framework. As users move from a large vertical display to a small landscape tablet, interactions feel familiar and the brand story remains cohesive.

Narrative Framework for Consistent Journeys

A clear, repeatable story structure grounds each screen in the same flow. By aligning every touchpoint to shared phases of interaction, we ensured journeys feel intentional, digestible, and easy to navigate—whether someone is exploring a single station or the entire experience.

Narrative Framework for Consistent Journeys

Exploration

Exploring a Digital Twin Helped Define the Right Purpose

We initially mapped the entire LAB9 environment as a "digital twin" — i.e., complete station flows, deep content models, and a CMS designed to mirror the physical space online. But as stations evolved rapidly, it became clear this level of fidelity wasn’t sustainable or aligned with how stakeholders used the content.

From Replication to Intent

We shifted the website to a higher-level overview, focusing on clarity and invitation rather than replication. This pivot gave LAB9 a digital presence that communicates the vision without requiring constant updates.

From Replication to Intent

See live page

Application

Bringing the System to Life Across Stations

With the architecture in place, we applied the system across every station—pairing modular UI patterns with hardware-specific layouts. Screens, fixtures, and physical environments all followed the same narrative structure and visual language.

Unified, Not Uniform

Across the space, the experience remained cohesive while allowing each station to express its unique story. The system proved flexible enough to support rapid iteration and consistent enough to unify the entire environment.