Locale 1.0

Due to COVID-19 restrictions, people were wary of leaving their homes but still wanted access to their neighborhood bakery and local farmer’s market. If they did end up stepping out, they were forced to wait in lines that would sometimes wrap around the block. Because of this, the form began to gain healthy momentum.

But, the name “Organic on the Go” was too literal to ever feel like a unicorn.

We decided a name change was necessary, so I ran a branding exercise with the rest of the founding team that landed on Locale — the word for your local community, which was exactly who we were serving. We wanted Locale to be like a family friend who shows you all of the best eateries in the area, one that makes you feel like a local when you visit for the first time.

Our tagline became “Eat Local, Shop Locale.”

The brand's ethos rested on three things: put vendors first; stay accessible to as many people as possible; and be selective about what we put on the platform, curating only the best products.

Several logo iterations, color palettes, and packaging designs later, I translated that identity into a complete visual system.

As momentum grew we needed to move off the Google Form fast, and it was up to me to decide how. With no prior coding knowledge and no technical co-founder, Webflow gave me the best ability to ship and iterate quickly without waiting on anyone.

What resulted was a front end built entirely in Webflow, with Airtable acting as a working backend, glued together by a handful of third-party apps to make it hum.

It wasn’t elegant, but that was the point. I could change anything on the site in an afternoon — test a layout, reorder a category, redesign a page — and see how customers responded by the weekend.

Working without engineers meant I got to solve problems I had no business solving alone: geotagging subdomains so each region had its own storefront; building filters for better discoverability; implementing overengineered search engines.

Having speed as a core tenet of our team, more than any single decision, is what got us through Y Combinator, helped us raise from a16z, and allowed us to go nationwide.

Over three years, I designed and shipped every page in that same stack, carrying the marketplace from a scrappy first launch to a polished storefront.

Locale positively impacted tens of thousands of families and individuals, along with hundreds of small businesses in California. The platform made it easy for users to discover the best local businesses and farms in their own community and across the state. Whether people were sending gifts to friends and family or coming back regularly to enjoy what we offered, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Every piece of the experience was thoughtfully designed.

Being the only designer on board taught me how to think, make decisions, build, and iterate quickly.