Kantha Bae
Five Years as a One-Person Creative Department
01
The Engagement
I was hired as a designer. Within months, I owned everything.
Kantha Bae is a DTC ecommerce brand selling handmade, one-of-a-kind clothing crafted from vintage textiles. When I came on in 2020, they had a themed Shopify site and a patchwork of systems held together by duct tape and good intentions.
What I became: The entire digital surface.
Product design, UI/UX, brand strategy, copywriting, email marketing, paid acquisition, SMS flows, website development, and now — a complete AI-native brand operating system.
No team. No agencies. Just me.
02
Ecommerce Experience Design
I redesigned and rebuilt the entire customer journey — product pages, collection flows, navigation, checkout, post-purchase.
Collection Pages as Editorial
Each collection gets a voice — "For the easy layers. The versatile souls. The ones who love to float." This isn't decoration; it's brand reinforcement at every touchpoint.
Product Pages That Tell Stories
Lead with feeling, follow with features. "This dress wants you to twirl" before "Adjustable waist tie." The copy converts because it sounds like a friend, not a catalog.
Social Proof Surfaced Early
Restructured hierarchy to surface reviews and scarcity signals where they influence decisions. "One-of-a-kind — when it's gone, it's gone."
Free Size Messaging
"Your body isn't a problem to solve" isn't just a tagline — it's embedded in every size guide, every product description, every touchpoint.
03
Marketing Collateral System
Every product launch needs assets: email graphics, social posts, promotional cards. With weekly drops and a one-person team, I needed a system that could produce high-quality collateral fast.
The Pattern
04
The Brand Brain
This is the work that changed everything.
In Year 4, I realized the bottleneck wasn't design or development — it was me. Every piece of copy, every email, every product description still required my brain. I couldn't scale beyond my own hours.
So I built a system that could. The Brand Brain is a complete AI-native brand operating system — a set of structured documents that define how the brand speaks, what it can and cannot say, and how to generate on-brand output across every channel.
What Makes This Different
Most "brand guidelines" are PDFs that sit in a Google Drive and get ignored. The Brand Brain is operational — it's designed to be fed into AI systems and produce usable output.
"We are not a fashion brand that happens to have a community. We are a community that happens to sell clothing."
"The voice sounds like a friend who is also on a spiritual journey — grounded but open, enthusiastic but not manic."
All language must feel like it comes from someone who genuinely cares about the person reading it. This is non-negotiable.The voice sounds like a friend who is also on a spiritual journey — grounded but open, enthusiastic but not manic, earnest but not naive.We are warm without being saccharine.We are spiritual without being preachy.We are confident without being arrogant.
What used to take 3 weeks now takes 3 days.
More importantly: the system is transferable. The brand isn't trapped in my head anymore.
05
Growth Engine
I don't just design the experience. I build and run the systems that drive traffic to it.
Creative strategy, ad copy, audience targeting
Full Klaviyo implementation — flows, campaigns
Launch alerts, restock notifications, VIP comms
Content strategy, community management
Post-purchase flows, win-back campaigns
Facebook group engagement, Bestie program
06
Design Decisions & Tradeoffs
Voice: Warm Without Being Saccharine
The brand serves a spiritual, wellness-oriented audience. It would be easy to lean into generic "goddess energy" language.
"You are enough. You are beautiful. You are a goddess. ✨💖"
"Your light is enough."
Scarcity: Honest Without Weaponizing
Every piece is genuinely one-of-a-kind. This creates real urgency. But the brand voice rejects FOMO manipulation.
"DON'T MISS OUT!!!" / "Last chance" / "Hurry"
"Once these find their person, they're gone — but there's always more magic coming."
Messaging Boundaries: What We Don't Say
The brand works with artisan partners. The story is compelling. But supply chains are complex, and claims invite scrutiny.
Do say: Handmade. One-of-a-kind. Vintage textiles. Quality and uniqueness we can prove.
07
How I Operate
This workload typically requires five or six people. I operate alone.
Not by working around the clock. By building systems.
Design-to-Code
Skip wireframes and prototypes. Design directly in code, then harden for production. What takes most teams weeks takes me days.
AI-Native Operations
The Brand Brain means I can generate launch copy in minutes. The system enforces consistency; I provide judgment and refinement.
Compounding Infrastructure
Every system I build makes the next project faster. Five years in, I'm not maintaining. I'm accelerating.
08
Results
What I Delivered
- • Complete website redesign
- • Marketing collateral system for weekly launches
- • Full Brand Brain (7 documents, ~15,000 words)
- • Email/SMS marketing infrastructure (Klaviyo)
- • Paid acquisition strategy and execution
- • Ongoing creative direction across all channels
In Progress
- • Headless front-end migration
- • React Native consumer app
09
Reflection
What Worked
Building the Brand Brain
This was the inflection point. Before it existed, I was the bottleneck. After, I could generate consistent output at scale.
The weekly rhythm
Aligning all marketing infrastructure to the natural drop cycle created coherence. Every channel reinforces the same moment.
Saying no to FOMO
It would be easy to juice short-term metrics with manipulation. The brand voice explicitly forbids it. This builds trust — the 196K-member community isn't an accident.
What I'd Do Differently
Build the Brand Brain earlier
I spent years 1-3 writing everything myself. If I'd built the system sooner, I could have scaled faster.
More rigorous A/B testing on paid
Growth has been strong, but I've relied more on intuition than systematic testing. More structure here would compound.
This isn't a project. It's a five-year operating system.
I walked in as a designer. I became the entire creative department.
35% YoY revenue growth. $5M+ brand. Zero external agencies. One person.
The Brand Brain is the multiplier.
This is what a one-person creative department looks like when you build systems instead of just doing work.
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