2019 · Citi × Thea · Brand system, mobile product, marketing · Confidential RFP response

What it was

Citi was invited to respond to an RFP from Thea, a women-focused fintech challenger looking for a partner to build out a banking community. The team at Citi put together a full proposal: strategy, brand system, mobile product prototype, card design, marketing, launch plan, the works. I led design across the deliverable.

We didn't win. The work didn't go to market. But six years later it's still one of the most complete brand-meets-product responses I've been part of, and the thinking on a number of fronts (personas, ecosystem, community-driven feature voting, brand activations) held up in ways I didn't expect at the time.

How it came together

This was never one person's work. It couldn't have been.

Strategy ran the audience research and built the persona framework. I worked with them closely on how the four personas (Brittany, Carla, Aubrey, Gloria) would carry through the deck and the app prototype, so the same women we were describing on page nine were the ones actually appearing on the dashboard mockups by page fourteen. Copy and brand built the voice. Marketing partnered with us on the launch plan, the influencer strategy, the activations. Research grounded the feature set. Project management kept thirty-eight pages and a working prototype on a timeline that should not have been possible.

I led design on all of it. The brand system, the deck, the app prototype, the card designs and taglines, the activation renders. Most of the visuals came out of my chair. But the page exists because Strategy gave me an audience to design for, copy gave me a voice to design with, and marketing gave me a world to design into. The handoffs barely felt like handoffs. It worked like one team.

What I led

I built the deck end-to-end: typography system, layout grid, the yellow palette that became the brand, the persona cards, the stat treatments, the ecosystem diagram, the activation mockups, the launch timeline.

I designed the Thea mobile app prototype: onboarding, dashboard, navigation, community, family finances, the upcoming-features voting screen.

I designed the Thea card. The yellow-on-yellow with the personalized tagline (Boss Lady, Bad Ass Mama, Force to Be Reckoned With) was the piece I'm probably proudest of. It was the smallest deliverable in the deck and the one that most clearly carried the brand idea: a product that lets you say who you are, on a thing you carry every day.

I directed the brand expressions in market: the Thea-Bike, the Thea Bar pop-up, the Live Nation takeover concept, the editorial mockups for The Cut, Vanity Fair, and American Banker.

I worked tight with copy on the voice and the card taglines, with strategy on the persona narratives, and with marketing on the activations.

What I took from it

Two things I still use.

When brand and product are designed by the same team in the same room at the same time, they reinforce each other in ways that are hard to fake later. The Thea card and the Thea app didn't feel "consistent." They felt like one thing. That's not a design system problem. It's an organizational one.

And the most complete work happens when you trust other people to do their part well. I led design. I didn't lead strategy, or copy, or research, or program. The work was better because four other leads were doing the same thing in parallel.