Every design starts as a hand drawing.
GoteFigure is my illustrated apparel brand. Every graphic on every piece started as a pencil sketch, then got inked on a Wacom, vectorized in Illustrator, placed onto a product template, photographed, listed on Shopify, and shipped. I did all of it — the drawing, the branding, the store, the photography, the fulfillment. 200+ pieces sold in the first quarter. The store is currently offline while I prepare a relaunch.
From sketch to listed product in under 3 hours.
I treat a personal brand the same way I treat a design system at work: build the pipeline once, ship faster forever. GoteFigure runs on a lightweight system of its own — a type scale, a color palette that shifts seasonally, templates for product mockups, templates for Instagram and TikTok posts, a standard photo setup for new drops. What used to take a full afternoon of fiddling in Illustrator became a repeatable process I could run in the evening after work. The shortest path from "idea for a hoodie graphic" to "listed on the store" is now under three hours.
Designed for how people actually shop on mobile.
Most of GoteFigure's traffic comes from Instagram and TikTok, which means almost every customer lands on a mobile product page from a social link and decides whether to buy within about ten seconds. I rebuilt the Shopify theme around that reality: the hero product image is the first thing you see, the add-to-cart is thumb-reachable on every screen size, the checkout is two taps from the product page, and there's nothing — no newsletter popup, no review widget, no upsell carousel — between a customer and their order. I also handled the photography, the listing copy, and the inventory myself.
What a brand taught me about systems.
The most useful thing GoteFigure gave me wasn't a storefront or a sales number. It was the realization that everything is a system waiting to be built, even the parts of work that don't look like product design. The relaunch will apply what I've learned at LexisNexis and on my own since then — a real design system, proper component architecture, and a shopping experience that feels as considered as the illustrations on the garments.
