Locale 3.0

We ran a UX research exercise designed by Michael Margolis. It involved 20-30 in-depth conversations with the people we thought would be our ideal or “bullseye” customers. The aim was to understand what type of product would be valuable enough in their lives that whatever we built would be a no brainer.

To make the conversations concrete, I helped design the interview questionnaire and made three website prototypes, each with unique value props. We put all three in front of people and observed how they reacted to each one.

We took all of the data gathered from these conversations and synthesized them into insights, principles, and value props that we thought would resonate most. We learned that people valued fully organic meals high in protein, no pesticides, seed oils; ingredients that didn't make them feel groggy and spike blood sugar, something you could eat every day.

Meals designed for longevity.

So that became Locale, a version that was a complete opposite of 2.0 in price and value props. The highest quality, healthiest meal service.

I rebranded Locale around the new value props, redesigned the website experience, and we rebuilt the site in two weeks to start testing for viability.

We wanted this to have nothing to do with 2.0, so I created a new logo and packaging, and we started putting meals in glass jars instead of plastic-sealed containers. We pushed the new identity deliberately far from the old one — we wanted an honest read on whether the product worked, not whether our existing brand or users could carry it.

We ran the new model as a separate service for a few months, and the numbers told the story fast. Retention, LTV, acquisition cost, even kitchen and warehouse operations were night and day. So we shut down 2.0 completely and never looked back.

By the time we built this site, the design-handoff step that bottlenecked Locale 2.0 was gone. The user dashboard, product cards, popups, toggles and buttons, the onboarding flow that turns a first-time visitor into a subscriber — I designed and helped ship, and maintain it as one design system.

The hardest part of shipping your own designs is how fast Figma goes stale once you've iterated on the product live in code. You end up in a back-and-forth between Figma artifacts and the real thing, which feels like a waste of time.

Lately I've been moving the design system into Storybook so it lives in the repo instead of Figma. That's the part of my workflow I think might be the future: I explore in Figma, then implement in the actual repo with Cursor, iterating live and refining components in the place they'll tangibly exist. I've started to believe design systems belong in the repo, not outside it.

My branding, UX, and packaging design helped grow Locale to $40M ARR. For a year I ran operations alongside design — scaling pick-and-pack to 5,000 orders and 35,000 meals a week, growing our LA deliveries, and writing the playbook for how we expand into new regions.

The current version of Locale has changed how thousands of people eat. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive: people come to us to lose weight, build muscle, steady their energy, improve gut health, find perimenopausal support, or just eat clean, toxin-free food every day. It's still growing, and fast.