Background
Kohl's hosted an early talent summit specifically for students going to their junior year. I was one of the 120+ students selected across a talent pool of 100 schools. I got to learn a lot about the different departments within Kohl's and interacted with professionals. Most notably through this experience I took on the case study challenge along side a team of students such as myself.
Case Study
Teams were tasked with creating strategies to boost Kohl's engagement. Throughout the summit presentations it was insinuated that Kohl's was looking to expand their digital efforts so we choose that to be the forefront of our strategy. The key components that the judges were looking for were customer and competitive insights, ideas for marketing, product, and customer experience, and a financial analysis of both the past quarter results and what influence the strategy would have on them currently. Another important point is that this strategy needed to appeal to all current shoppers. It needed to be broad enough to engage customers from babiesRUS to SEPHORA. This case study was set up to have us work cross functionally and create a presentation with correlating elements.
Our Strategy
As I mentioned our main focus was on expanding digital engagement. After analyzing different metrics the team decided to target Kohl's social media and shopping website/app. We choose to utilize Kohl's newest campaign model "Kohl's Mom'' known as Ellie Kemper. First introduced publicly in March of 2025 Kohl's Mom campaign was ruled a success so the group and I thought she would be a perfect addition to our strategy.
Our biggest question was how could we include the Kohl's Mom persona into our strategy. Wanting to stay true to her representation we wanted her to be involved in the customer shopping experience. The commercial I am referring to is listed (here). With that in mind we came up with the idea that Kohl's mom could be an AI assistant. This seemed to be the poular idea within the group since some things are hard to find within the Kohl's e-commerce platforms. We also brainstormed some ways this AI assistant could engage with customers and better their experience!
Where I Come In
To assist our presentation I decided I would make a mockup of how the AI assistant "Kohl's Mom" would look. Additionally I listed some good prompts and capabilities that this assistant should have. Given the limited time for this case study I quickly made two phone screen mock ups a user flow and a prompt list all within Figma and FigJam.
Team Collaboration
A student on my team did a competitive analyzes to help us realize Kohl's short comings in comparison to its biggest competitors. We all decided to have Target be highlighted as the main competitors to match up again Kohls. This competitive analyzes helped us realize our strategy to better engage customers. Bellow is a short summarized version my team member included in our presentation.
Another student on my team is very proficient in web analytics and SEO. The the data below helped us shape our strategies direction. She decided to outline searched terms that are likely to show up in relation to Kohl's. Using this date I was able to get an idea for some of the AI Assistant prompts I would use.
Below is our financial analyzes. The student on my team who did this portion took on a lot of responsibility. The initial goal that Kohl's wants more engagement with customer would result in more money so judges put an emphasis on this section. By tracking the revenue gain from 2024 we were able to learn more about each section of Kohl's and how much they contribute to sales. Seeing as our strategy needed to benefit the general spectrum of Kohl's this information influenced our decisions and was the foundation for our strategy pitch!
Conclusion
I want to end by talking about how great this experience was and how I benefited. The big take away from this was learning how to work cross functionally on a big idea with a smaller team. Figuring out the different ways we could combine our skills was very challenging but the finishing result was very rewarding! As a designer I am aware of how important it is to be collaborative and a team player. I know in the future I will be working together with product managers, engineers, analyst and many other teams so being able to get this experience very early in my career is a blessing. I really feel like I accomplished something with my team and I look forward to many more experiences like this!
Additionally getting feedback and mentorship from the professionals at Kohl's was very helpful as well. My team's mentors really helped us understand the main goal and build a strategy based off of it. On top of that getting to present to judges really helped my pitching and presentation skills. In fact I will share that this presentation earned my team and I exclusive access to interview at Kohl's in future!
