By Sumin Han, Creative Direction & Marketing, Gelato Pique USA
The Problem With Traditional Holiday Shopping Pages
Customers shopping for gifts behave differently from customers shopping for themselves. Our internal data confirmed this clearly: approximately 10% of repeat customer orders were tied to gifting purchases, which told us that gifting was already a meaningful part of the brand experience. It wasn't an add-on feature. It was a core shopping journey that deserved to be treated as one.
Yet when gift shoppers arrived on site, they came with uncertainty: What would make a good gift? Where do I even start? Our existing experience had no answer for that. Gift-related services like gift boxes, wrapping options, and gift cards were displayed as standalone merchandise, sitting in prime visual real estate that should have been reserved for product discovery. Customers were being asked to think about packaging before they had found any inspiration at all.
That friction became the starting point for the Holiday Gift Market redesign.
Designing Around Gifting Intent
Rather than organizing the experience around product categories, we rebuilt the landing page around gifting intent.
Recipient-based navigation, For Her, For Him, and For Pets, had existed on previous gift guide pages. But without consistent seasonal updates, the categories had become stale. The structure was there; the curation was not. This time, we built dedicated pages for each recipient category and committed to refreshing them with each season, with product selections that matched the gifting occasion and the moment.
We also used this as an opportunity to surface something many customers were missing: our bundle promotion.
Customers who purchase sets receive a bundled gift, but awareness had been low. Since gift shoppers tend to gravitate toward sets naturally, the audience and the promotion were already aligned. Integrating it directly into the dedicated pages was less about introducing something new and more about finally putting an existing offer in front of the right people at the right time.
One category also went through a naming adjustment. The fourth option launched as Under $100, drawing approximately 4.8% of page visitors, the lowest among all categories. Renaming it to Accessories in March brought that figure to around 6.1%. A small shift, but a useful signal that framing affects whether customers feel invited into a category.
Gift-related services were repositioned rather than removed. Gift boxes, wrapping services, and gift cards remained accessible, but no longer interrupted product discovery. Customers encountered them naturally as part of the purchase flow, rather than being confronted with them before they had found anything to buy.
The creative challenge throughout was balancing warmth with clarity. Gelato Pique's visual identity is soft and emotionally resonant by nature, and the campaign needed to preserve that while creating a more intuitive path to purchase. Every decision, from typography and category hierarchy to image selection and spacing, was made with that balance in mind.
A Closer Look: For Pets
Pet products represented approximately 2% of total revenue, the smallest category by a significant margin. But the data pointed to a specific problem: despite generating clicks, the category was converting at around 3%, against a site-wide average of 5%.
Adding a dedicated For Pets page was a deliberate attempt to address that gap. Year-over-year, average engagement time per active user increased by 92.61% and views per active user rose by 21.36%. Month-over-month, both metrics showed an approximately 11% uptick, modest but notable coming off a major Black Friday promotion. Conversion at this scale takes longer to move, but the engagement shift was enough to validate the direction and carry the category forward into subsequent campaigns.
Extending the Experience Across Every Touchpoint
Consistency across channels mattered just as much as the landing page redesign itself.
The same gifting logic was carried into email marketing, paid social campaigns, and promotional assets. Instead of treating newsletters as broad promotional blasts, we approached them as curated shopping guides: highlighting gifting scenarios, bundled recommendations, and seasonal product pairings to help customers make decisions more naturally.
That alignment between advertising and on-site experience turned out to be critical. Customers arriving from Meta campaigns or email promotions encountered the same visual language and shopping structure they had already been introduced to, which created a smoother transition from discovery to purchase.
The campaign ultimately achieved a 16.59x ROAS, outperforming the brand's already strong December average of 15.51x and significantly exceeding the fashion industry Meta ads median ROAS of 2.18x to 2.90x, with top 10% performers in the sector reaching 6.0x (Mistakidis, Allie. Triple Whale Facebook Ads Benchmarks Report, 2025; Fashion eCommerce Meta Ads Benchmarks, April 6, 2026).
When a Seasonal Campaign Becomes a Repeatable System
The strongest validation came after the holiday season ended.
What started as a Holiday Gift Market became the foundation for two additional campaigns: a Spring Market launched in March centered around the seasonal transition, and a Gift Shop campaign in April timed ahead of May's family-oriented holidays. Each iteration adapted the same recipient-driven navigation and editorially guided structure while refreshing the product selection to match the moment. The holiday season called for cozy, gift-ready sets. Spring leaned into new arrivals and lighter gifting occasions. The April campaign was built around the gifting behaviors that tend to peak in the lead-up to Mother's Day and family milestones.
Following the redesign, gift box orders increased approximately 3x year-over-year. Improved page structure and product discoverability played a role, but so did the decision to make the bundle promotion visible to an audience that was already predisposed to purchasing sets. It was not a new offer. It was an existing one, finally placed where the right customers could see it.
Together, these campaigns consistently contributed the effectiveness of combining editorial-style merchandising with a performance-driven campaign structure.
At that point, the Holiday Gift Market had stopped being a seasonal experiment. It had become an operational creative framework.
What This Campaign Demonstrates About Creative Direction in Fashion Retail
The most effective creative work in fashion e-commerce is not campaign-specific. It is systemic.
The recipient-driven navigation and editorial shopping structure developed for the Holiday Gift Market were not designed to solve a single seasonal problem. They were designed to change how customers move through a brand experience entirely, from the moment of uncertainty that defines gift shopping to the moment of confident purchase.
Designing for conversion and designing for experience are not opposing goals. They are the same goal, approached from different angles. The Holiday Gift Market worked because we started with the customer's emotional state, the need to find the right gift with confidence, and built the creative around solving that specific feeling. For fashion and lifestyle brands with a strong aesthetic identity like Gelato Pique, the risk is always prioritizing beauty over clarity. The most effective campaigns find the intersection: visuals that feel true to the brand, structured in a way that makes the customer's next step obvious.
The results reflected that. A 16.59x ROAS, approximately 3x growth in gift box orders, and a framework that has since driven more than 30% of monthly revenue across multiple campaigns. Not a one-time execution, but a scalable creative system built to perform consistently across seasons.
When a creative framework gets repeated and keeps working, that's the clearest sign it was built on something real.
Sumin Han leads creative direction and performance marketing at Gelato Pique USA, contributing to campaign strategy, visual production, and digital execution across the brand's U.S. market initiatives.