Mailchimp acquired Creative Assistant from Sawa—an AI graphic design tool that could create social graphics, email headers, and ad creative in seconds. The technology was promising. The results weren't.

Users jumped straight into generating designs without enough brand context. Website scraping pulled assets but dropped people into the designer immediately. Incomplete kits—missing colors, fonts, or personality—produced generic, unusable output. Users without websites had no path in. There was no validation that brand assets were sufficient before generation.

The core issue was garbage in, garbage out. The AI needed robust brand information to create on-brand designs, and users weren't providing it.

Design an onboarding experience that guides users through a complete brand kit before generating, validates completeness and prompts for gaps, offers multiple entry points (website, sample brand, manual), and ships in three months with a single designer-developer—me.

This was my first time using React, inside a complex front-end architecture with tricky state management across parent-child components.

I redesigned onboarding so users provided complete brand information before generating, with three pathways:

1. Import my brand — enter a URL; scrape logos, colors, fonts, and images; review complete/incomplete indicators; edit before proceeding
2. Sample brand — a fully populated kit for users without websites or who want to explore first; customizable to match a real brand
3. Manual upload — build from scratch with full editing control

All paths converge on brand kit review: logos with application rules, color palette with hex values, primary/secondary fonts, personality sliders, and button style previews. Users can't proceed to generation until the kit is sufficiently complete.

Stack was React and the Mailchimp design system. Timeline was three months, including the React learning curve. I designed, coded, and shipped the entire onboarding experience—collaborating with one engineer for backend integration (scraping and generation), with PM briefs from the Sawa founder and design manager guidance, otherwise operating independently.

The hard technical pieces were multi-step state across parent-child components and integrating with backend systems for scraping and AI generation—constraints that only showed up once the flow lived in production code.

Onboarding shipped to millions of Mailchimp users in about three months. Brand kit completion improved; confusion about off-brand results dropped; users without websites could try the product.

After I left, Creative Assistant features were absorbed into core Mailchimp. In December 2024 the standalone product was sunset because those capabilities had rolled into the main platform—a success of absorption, not abandonment.

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