curriculum vitae

With over 6 years as a Structural Packaging Designer in the toy industry, I specialize in innovative, functional, and eco-friendly packaging. I’m driven by the challenge of blending creative design with structural efficiency, ensuring products are eye-catching, cost-effective, and sustainable. I excel in fast-paced environments, collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver impactful packaging.

With a background of 12+ years in Graphic Design and Pre-Press experience, I bring deep expertise to retail packaging, aligning brand and product vision with structures optimized for mass production.

Diving back into the toy industry, I’ve once again found myself in a fast-paced, highly dynamic role developing solutions covering both engineering and design. Collaborating with Product Designers, Logistics, Quality Assurance, and Marketing disciplines, I am  continuing my snowballing expertise in retail packaging as well as producing packaging artwork for multiple brands.

• Real time packaging development in tandem with new product design
• Producing prototypes exploring creative directions while optimizing materials for increased sustainability, reduced waste, and competitive brand presence.
• Guiding suppliers and factories to ensure proper mass-production quality
• Press-friendly technical setup skills required for fast and easy mass production.

Expanding my reach into flexible packaging, I’ve gained a highly technical understanding of designing for flexo printed and formed poly films. Heavily involved in ensuring manufacturing accuracy through precision dieline design, I set the stage for intuitive, designer-friendly print layouts for high-speed mass production.

• Overhauled company wide dieline master layout standards for dimensional accuracy, visual clarity, and streamlined customer QC experience
• Coordinated with press and converter operators ensuring successful print and forming trials
• Worked with international customers developing package sizing, optimization on different bag machines and prototyped samples

Covering more than the titles suggest, I had broad responsibilities collaborating with product designers in one of the fastest, most demanding toy industry environments.

My experience at ORB Toys spanned market research, concept exploration, structural design engineering, prototyping, and efficiency-driven refinement under tight timelines. I carved out a role blending engineering and artistic skills, elevating the company’s capabilities.

• Product packaging and shelf display dieline design development, engineering, prototyping, and refinement, and strategic cost planning on a variety of substrates for factory mass production
• Production design and formatting for large-scale tradeshow graphics and printing in on-site printshop
• Extensive pre-press processing for press artwork handoff
• Printshop workflow using Esko i-Cut Production, Esko Layout Essentials, and Onyx RIP-Que software
• Operation and maintenance of Epson large format printers and Esko Kongsberg CAD cutting table operation

Working within a marketing team, I helped strategically develop and deliver internal and client-facing promotional content. My role focused on driving business development in specific legal areas and strengthening brand presence following a corporate rebranding. I distilled shifting business objectives and translated them into creative marketing concepts for team proposals.

• Establishing branding identity standards on a wide range of marketing collateral
• Developing strategically targeted brochures, booklets and advertising campaigns with Marketing Coordinators and Marketing Directors
• Designing and developing web content, client newsletters, event materials and HTML Email communications
• Managing print projects through all production and coordination stages

Working independently with small businesses and startups, I’m able to apply the growing skills and knowledge I’ve gained through my work experience to provide both print and digital media solutions. This freelance work allows me to constantly build my repertoire as a designer and challenge my angles of attack by diving into a variety of industries, each case needing a strategic, success-focused approach in ground-up development to be a smooth and painless experience for the clients.

• Meeting with clients to distill project objectives, strategy, execution, and marketed rollout stages
• Providing experienced based insights while listening to the client’s needs and pushing the best blend of both into the work
• Coordination, management, and quality control of any external production work
• Maintaining ongoing supportive relationships as the client requires