Pronghorn Gear

Director of User Experience (2013 – 2016) Led the design and research of the company’s off-road gear for its B2C e-commerce website that offered award winning designed front and rear bumpers for Jeep Wrangler and Toyota Tacoma models, along with other innovative products. I managed a small team of UX designers and developers. 

I started at Pronghorn Gear during their start up phase with private investor rounds of funding leading multiple design and business efforts and teamed up with long time friend and co-worker Trey Hermann. We both worked together throughout multiple stops in our careers (Vyopta, Origin Games, Chickenboy, Lante and Big Interactive) and wanted to team up again.

The new innovative off-road products being created were going to need an equally strong brand and unique website with an easy e-commerce component. I designed and built the website from the ground up using Wordpress and Woo Commerce, the plugin eco system was a perfect fit to quickly expand capabilities and customize anything through CSS. New products were A/B tested to gauge interest and compare to existing products.

SEO was crucial to the success of Pronghorn Gear who had a lot of off-road bumper competition (Jeep OEM, Smittybuilt, ARB and Ranch Hand) to name a few. But none of the competition had a light weight aluminum built bumper, and that became key. Our SEO kept Pronghorn Gear at the top of online searches for over a year and helped develop a critical fan base following. 

We soon had a steady stream of sales coming in for Pronghorn's unique front bumper for the Jeep JK series, which help fuel and finance the expansion of the product line and company. This included rear bumpers, new vehicles, other bumper accessories and the design and development of the the company's most innovative product yet - LinkTrac, a recovery tool that worked with any vehicle.

In addition to being Head of Design, I was involved with running many of the day to day business operations. This included maintaining product inventory and helping packing products for shipment. One of the biggest aspects for success was being active in the off-road/overlanding community. This included attending multiple events to help raise awareness, promotions and investors.

Pronghorn Gear stopped operating in 2020 due to pandemic disruptions affecting sales, manufacturing and distribution.