Hayward

Strategic Opportunity

Hayward had an established product brand, but its digital presence lacked a clearly defined purpose, audience, or experience strategy. Haywardpools.com primarily served pool owners, dealers, service partners, and other industry audiences, while the broader corporate organization needed a unified digital home.

The opportunity was to transform haywardpools.com into hayward.com: a single destination for Hayward’s corporate story, product catalog, ecommerce experience, education, support, and customer engagement. Doing so required defining the role of the site, understanding its audiences, and creating a more complete and flexible expression of the Hayward brand.

Approach

As Creative Director, I led a multidisciplinary team through strategy, research, experience design, and visual direction. We established audience priorities, clarified the purpose of the site, and defined a roadmap for bringing corporate, marketing, education, and ecommerce content into one connected experience.

The work included customer and stakeholder research, experience benchmarking, competitive analysis, journey mapping, information architecture, wireframes, and visual design. We also designed specialized experiences including a support center, rewards program, pool-planning tools, calculators, and product discovery workflows.

Beyond the existing logo and color palette, Hayward needed a more developed brand system that could support a wide range of content and use cases. I led the evolution of the visual and editorial direction, establishing reusable patterns and a Figma design system that could carry the brand across marketing, education, product, and ecommerce experiences.

The team worked closely with stakeholders, product owners, content teams, and development partners to ensure the strategy and design direction carried through implementation.

Outcomes

The redesigned hayward.com was developed, tested, and launched as a unified digital home for Hayward. The new experience brought together corporate storytelling, the Why Hayward narrative, educational content, product discovery, ecommerce, customer support, rewards, and specialized pool-planning tools.

I led quality assurance across UX and interaction design, ensuring the intended experience carried through development and that the design system was consistently inherited across the site. The resulting framework gave Hayward a stronger foundation for continued content development, brand equity, and digital innovation.