Performance Ad Creative

Overview
Rugs.com is a direct-to-consumer brand with a catalog of more than 500,000 rugs, and its business runs on promotions. We launched two sales a week across seven storefronts: Rugs.com, eSaleRugs, Handknotted.com, iRugs UK, iRugs.ch, AURugs and Rugs.ca. On top of that steady rhythm came the big moments like Black Friday, Cyber Week, Cyber Monday and January Closeout. As Creative Director, I built the creative system that made that pace possible, led the concept, art direction and design for the campaigns, and directed the photography behind them.

The Challenge
Sale creative has to work in about a second. Shoppers scroll past banners and ads quickly, so the offer has to land right away. The harder part is doing that without turning a home decor brand into a discount store. A rug is something people live with for years, and the creative still needed to make them want it in their home.

The volume added pressure. Two sales a week across seven sites meant more than 700 site launches a year, each needing homepage, product page, email and social assets. During peak weekends, offers changed by the day and sometimes by the hour, and every change had to show up everywhere at once.

The Approach
I built each campaign around one simple rule. The number reads first, and the rug is still the hero. Large, clean numerals carry the discount, while real product styled in a seasonal scene does the selling. For Black Friday that meant a round rug under a Christmas tree with wrapped gifts on a dark background. Cyber Week used panels of styled rooms so shoppers could see a range of looks in one banner. January Closeout went the other way with an illustrated winter forest that felt calm after the holiday rush.

Everything was designed as a system rather than a set of one-off pieces. I created the campaign templates and a brand style for each storefront, with its own fonts and colors, and set the standard for every marketing asset on the sites. I also redesigned the Rugs.com homepage so it was built to showcase these campaigns. Headlines, offer lockups and urgency badges like “only 1 hour left” were swappable elements, so the team could update an offer live without redesigning anything, and one concept could go out to the homepage, banners, email, paid social and Google Shopping the same day.

When a sale wasn’t performing, I worked directly with the owner, our executives, the CTO and our project manager to rework it mid-campaign, adjusting the offer, the creative or where it sat on the site.

Photography
Photography was planned with the campaigns in mind. I designed our in-house lifestyle studio with 10 bays where the furniture, decor, walls and floors could all be changed, which let us shoot styled scenes for up to 120 products a day. We shot rugs overhead and in those styled sets with room for type, which kept layouts clean and gave us more ways to crop for each format.

Paid Social
The same thinking carried into our Meta, TikTok, Pinterest and YouTube creative. We tested static, carousel and short-form video versions of each offer and kept the ones that performed.