(2023-2025)

Cashrewards Retail Media

Building a $7M Revenue Stream Through Strategic Design and Innovation

Context

In 2022, the company sought to diversify revenue streams by creating a retail media product — an ad-driven solution delivering targeted, relevant advertising without disrupting the trusted member experience.

As lead product designer, my challenge was to create a retail media experience that felt native, trustworthy, and valuable to both members and advertisers — all while working within a fragmented, fast-moving environment where internal alignment was still forming.

Cashrewards had no existing retail media infrastructure—no ad placements, no reporting or measurement tools, and no internal guidelines or principles for advertising.

Internally, there was skepticism: teams worried advertisements could cannibalise the cashback revenue, user experience and erode member trust. The company faced competing priorities across product, engineering, sales, and design, and lacked a unified vision or framework for retail media.

Retail media was developed with Design guidelines that maintained the user experience whilst driving and balancing objectives with business and advertisers.

Discovery

To succeed, the design needed to carefully balance business goals with user experience, gain internal buy-in, and integrate tightly with product and engineering to deliver at scale.

The first months involved deep discovery across multiple teams. I spent time with product managers, engineers, sales, and marketing to understand not just technical constraints, but the fears and motivations driving resistance. Early user research and competitor analysis revealed that members were open to ads — as long as they were relevant and unobtrusive.

This phase was as much about building relationships and empathy internally as it was about gathering data. The ambiguity and doubt were real, but I saw an opportunity to use design as a bridge — creating clarity and trust through thoughtful, user-centric solutions.

Ideation

I led ideation workshops with cross-functional teams, advocating for ad placements that respected the member journey. We sketched and prototyped a range of ad formats — from hero banners and sticky bars to sponsored search results — always iterating with feedback from both internal stakeholders and members.

One pivotal insight was reframing ads as “Cashback Amplification,” which helped align advertising with the company’s core value proposition and reduce internal friction.

2025 saw the implementation of non-endemic IAB banners throughout the website to captailise on our impressions. Like the rest of the Retail Media product, this was introduced with careful balance.

Solution

Collaborating closely with engineering, we built a lightweight ad-serving system and dynamic creative automation that slashed banner production time by 90%. My role was to ensure the advertising design system could flex to accommodate dynamic content while maintaining brand consistency.

I also created visual communication tools and design specs to educate stakeholders and advertisers, helping build confidence in retail media’s value. Through frequent check-ins and constructive feedback loops with designers across squads, I ensured our work stayed aligned with evolving product and business goals.

This process resulted in Cashrewards’ first full-stack retail media product suite, delivering $1 million in its first year and growing steadily thereafter.

Supplier became a large audience target for our Retail Media sales team. I led the design to create a pathway that allowed us to get to market quicker and start unlocking more revenue.

Metrics

Seeing retail media generate over $7 million in incremental revenue and achieve CTRs 3x above industry benchmarks was immensely rewarding. But the real impact, for me, was helping shift company culture — transforming initial skepticism into company-wide collaboration.