E-Commerce B2C · Lead UX Designer · 8 Weeks · 2022–2023
Barstool Sports Store
How I improved conversion by 11.5% for a store with 3,700+ products — by making it easier to find what you're actually looking for.
Role
Lead UX Designer
Timeline
Nov 2022 – Feb 2023 · 8 weeks
Team
Emilie Mazurek, Katherine Gowin, Joseph Bona
Key outcome
+11.53% conversion rate
Background
Barstool Sports Store is the official merchandise destination for Barstool Sports — a sports and pop culture media company with a massive, passionate fan base. The store carries over 2,700 apparel products, 600 accessories, and 400 hats across dozens of Barstool brands and personalities.
I was headhunted to join the design team and tasked with improving the store experience. The scale of the catalog made discoverability the core design problem.
The problem
With 3,700+ products, shoppers struggled to find what they wanted. An audit revealed three specific issues driving drop-off:
- Broken filtering: Up to 7 different "blue" color variants mixed together, and incompatible size categories appeared together (e.g. shoe sizes mixed with shot glass quantities).
- Wrong products in wrong places: Clothing items appeared on accessories pages; the categorization system had no coherent logic.
- Brand filters didn't work on brand pages: When a shopper landed on a specific brand page and tried to filter, the filters didn't activate — functionally useless.
Research & insight
Data analysis revealed a key insight: brand collections made up half of the top 10 pages by revenue. Barstool's audience doesn't shop by category — they shop by personality, by show, by brand. They come in wanting "Big Cat merch" or "KFC Radio gear," not "hoodies."
This shaped the hypothesis: if we made top categories and brands easier to find, shoppers would spend less time scrolling and more time buying.
The solution
Two focused interventions:
Solution 01
Improved navigation & filtering
Before: Filter options visually blended with page content, expanded menus required extensive scrolling, and filter categories were arbitrary and incompatible.
After: Prominent filter and sort buttons, collapsed menus with all options visible immediately, expanded and logically organized filter options — including fixing the brand filter functionality on brand pages.
Solution 02
Brand personality & collection cards
Before: Generic category pages with no clear brand identity, limited editions mixed indistinguishably with regular products.
After: Personalized brand banners that immediately signal where you are, plus collection cards every 7 product tiles to surface limited-edition drops — keeping the brand voice intact while improving discoverability.
Results
+11.5%
conversion rate — shoppers experiencing new design vs. control group
3,700+
products made navigable with a coherent filtering system
50%
of top revenue pages were brand collections — validated the brand-first approach