Welcome to my portfolio, in it I highlight the many creative outlets I use to express my need to develop ideas, make, build, and create. Some areas highlight my professional contributions, others show the personal outlets that I draw upon to discover and experiment. I feed what I learn back into the professional because product development is where I get intentional about my creativity and focus it. 

I've always been creative, mechanically minded, and fascinated by how things work. I study how things are made, the materials used, and how pieces are designed and fit together. As early as four years old, I began building helicopters and planes out of paperclips, straws, cardboard, and other items. I was the type of kid who when any household appliance broke, I would pull it out of the garbage and take it in the garage and tear it apart to see how it worked. I would examine how different elements were fastened together, what it took to put it together, what it took to take it apart, what kind of materials were used and so on. I've always had a desire to build, design, create, tinker, and with that comes the need to deconstruct. The best way to understand how something is made is to take it apart and examine it by its parts and how they relate and work together.

As a native of Santa Monica California, I enjoyed living in Los Angeles for 20 years. When I graduated from high school in 1989, I was accepted to the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising and wanted to focus on visual merchandising by designing retail displays and spaces. I put those plans on hold and decided to do two years of volunteer work in Florida with plans to attend FIDM when I returned in 1992. Back in Los Angeles, life threw me some curveballs and in 1993 I decided to move to Utah. Living in Provo, I worked for a sheet-fed print shop between 1993 and 1997. In 1996 I went to Provo College at night and completed 92 credit hours in 11 months and graduated in graphic design. In 1997 I left the print shop to pursue more creative roles and began working for PDC, a large yellow page advertising firm with 150 titles throughout the U.S. and Canada. I spent 14 1/2 years there and experienced a steady progression of responsibilities and leadership roles.

My introduction to product development happened at PDC when, as part of a cross functional team, I helped design the user experience of an ERP platform and an online proofing platform we were creating. These were not actual physical products but I began to see the structure of the development process with it's many steps, broken down into lists and sub projects being assigned across several teams. Two years later, after the company became Ziplocal, I was heavily involved in designing the user experience and GUI aspects of two new digital products.

In 1999, while at PDC, Provo College asked me to come back and do some teaching, so I taught three terms in their night graphic design program. Shortly after 9/11, I was contracted to provide security for the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Winter Games where I was a team lead at SLOC headquarters, PDC allowed me the time needed for that commitment. In May 2011, PDC merged with another publisher and our production department of 100 employees was largely dissolved through layoffs. In the fall of 2011, Utah Valley University brought me on to teach one term of production design in their graphic design program. In December 2011, I was put to work by Jamberry, a start up in the direct sales space, and given the job of building and scaling manufacturing and operations as they planned for rapid growth. I spent the next three years being involved in every operational aspect and wore many hats through multiple director level positions. While at Jamberry, the common thread that ran through all my functions, roles, skills and activities was product development, everything I did directly supported product and a better customer experience. 

Since I graduated in graphic design I've been professionally involved in creative processes, but my involvement was always on the management, technical, or teaching side, never hands on as a graphic designer. My professional experience consisted of operations management, print production, project management, materials, packaging, relationship management, sourcing, purchasing and so on. I saw that all of these things came together in harmony through the product development process. Through my career I have worked on all the pieces of essentially a deconstructed product, then came the understanding that product development was just about putting them all back together again. Back in 2007, I learned exactly how the what, who, when, why and how all worked together and in that process was the creativity I craved but it was being achieved through a lot of technical and less creative functions and projects.

The first two products I helped develop at Jamberry were the Juniors and the French Tips. These were both line extensions of the signature product, but each had many unique challenges that took time to prototype, test and work through before successful catalog launches. After that, there wasn't one Jamberry product or product line launched that I didn’t have a key role in the development process of, because I knew the materials, processes, vendors, packaging, wants and needs of the customers, and how to bring it all together.

I’m married with two children and live in Utah Valley.