Shoppable Email
Project: Shoppable Email
Type: New web application
Project charter
Shoppable Email was born from a long-term vision: understand a user’s taste in products through the digital breadcrumbs they leave behind. One of the most overlooked but telling sources? Spam and promotional emails.
We realized that email—while not typically a place users go to shop—is flooded with shoppable content. Brands constantly push sales, promos, and product launches through inboxes, yet users either ignore them or feel overwhelmed. We saw an opportunity to reclaim that content, clean it up, and turn it into a curated, visually appealing shopping experience.
Our challenge: How might we transform the noise of shopping-related emails into a useful signal that helps users discover products they actually love?
Solution
We started by reframing email not as a place to send messages, but as a place to pull shoppable intent.
We built a web app where users could:
Link their email accounts to surface product-focused emails
Automatically extract and visualize individual products, promos, and sales from their inbox
View this content in a clean, aesthetic feed—built for browsing, not sorting
Upload their own screenshots or photos of products, which we’d analyze and convert into shoppable cards
Get a custom “shopping email” (proxy inbox) to sign up for brand emails without cluttering their personal or work inbox
This allowed users to turn scattered, passive behavior—like signing up for a newsletter or taking a screenshot—into an intentional, shoppable experience.
Through this, we discovered something more powerful: the brands users engaged with gave us a strong signal of their overall taste. Suddenly, the proxy inbox became not just a spam filter, but a taste-profiling engine.
Outcomes
Designed and launched the MVP experience as the only designer.
Created a new behavior loop that turned passive data (emails + screenshots) into active shopping signals
Identified key insights around taste modeling and mood, informing the next iteration of the product
Currently working on the next version of Shoppable Email—focused on building personalized taste profiles and using them to power smarter product discovery.
