George Zikos

Toronto-based luxury skincare retailer offering clinical-grade products and specialized treatments.

• Led the end-to-end redesign, build, and optimization of the retailer's Shopify store, increasing e-commerce retail revenue share from 35% to 48% within the first 12 months. The site has since grown to power 60% of all retail revenue.
• Conducted structured UX research with customers and recruited users through interviews, wireframing, prototyping, and testing (Figma + Maze) to simplify information architecture, surface gaps in our assumptions, and enhance customer journeys.
• Built responsive, accessible UI components in Figma, contributing to a 40% improvement in mobile load times and significantly reducing friction across key user flows. Post-launch, conversion rates climbed from 2.67% to 4.12% (+54%).
• Redesigned high-priority opt-in and re-engagement flows as part of a targeted acquisition and retention strategy: driving a ~40% increase in email subscribers and transforming an inactive channel into a $100K/year revenue stream.
• Developed reusable design patterns and documentation to guide future UX enhancements, support stakeholder collaboration, and scale consistent experiences across evolving platforms.
• Assembled and led a cross-functional creative team to align product and brand execution across web, email, and packaging, ensuring consistency at every customer touchpoint while reinforcing UX continuity and business goals.

Toronto-based legal cannabis retailer operating under complex regulatory constraints.

• Led the UX strategy, design, and development of a scalable, regulation-compliant website, designing a modular UI and content architecture to support multiple store locations, job listings, and content publishing, serving 5K+ monthly unique visitors.
• Balanced legal compliance with a seamless UX around product discovery, resulting in a site that has facilitated over $500K in annual revenue.
• Designed and built a flexible content model and reusable UI components, enabling non-technical stakeholders to maintain and contribute independently.
• Prioritized accessibility by aligning design and development with WCAG 2.0 AA standards: achieving 90%+ scores in automated audits (Stark, Lighthouse) and validating core flows via keyboard navigation to support AODA compliance. This future-proofed the business against Ontario's legal threshold for accessibility enforcement in a highly scrutinized industry.
• Combined early-stage creative and competitive research with iterative design sprints to refine UX, shape content strategy, IA, and UI direction.
• Conducted keyword research and competitive analysis to inform a site-wide redesign focused on content structure: identifying high-performing brands, aligning merchandising to market potential, and surfacing strategic gaps in U.S. expansion readiness.