Founder, Design Director
Surf Studios · Client Work.
The automotive industry’s leading international brands trust my agency for digital design, growth, and the build, end to end: Permatex, Fast Orange, Spray Nine, Versachem, Evercoat, and more.
No handoffs: design and build in the same hands.
- Outcome
- Six-plus national brands taken end to end: brand, UX, and the build, no handoffs
- Permatex: a live, multi-year engagement across dozens of delivered workstreams
- Evercoat: a custom in-shop sales tool still in production with their reps
- Each brand given a product-first site of its own, not a slot in a template
- Problem
- The automotive brands of Fortune 500 manufacturer ITW (Permatex, Fast Orange, Spray Nine, Versachem, Evercoat) lived inside corporate templates that buried the products. Each needed a home of its own with a clear path to purchase.
- My role
- Product design, UX/UI, design systems · Brand strategy and web development · Designed and built. No handoffs, no cookie cutters
- Key calls
- A home of its own for every brand instead of corporate templates
- Clients who keep coming back, because I over-deliver and drive results
Still in production, not archived
This is live work. Each ITW automotive brand got the same end-to-end treatment: audit the inherited site, rebuild the brand voice, design a product-first system, and launch a site that sells. Here is the work, brand by brand.
Evercoat: a sales tool, not a webpage.
Evercoat’s field reps ran shop evaluations on paper. I turned that into a digital in-shop sales tool: a rep enters a body shop’s metrics and the revenue and savings update live as they talk, turning a normal visit into a data-backed business case the manager can sign off on right there, signature and all. It scales the numbers across multi-shop operators and exports a branded PDF the manager keeps. My design, my code, in production with their sales team today.
Permatex.com.
Permatex is bigger than most people realize. Walk the automotive aisle at Walmart, O’Reilly, or Advance Auto Parts and much of what is on the shelf is Permatex or one of its sister brands. A full redesign and prototype of the flagship site for ITW’s biggest automotive brand: a bold editorial hero, a Find Your Solution search-first product experience, an influencer community program, and PermatexTraining.com, the training portal I built and launched in 2020. The automotive trade press covered that launch, and when the program outgrew its original page builder I rebuilt the back end so their team could keep scaling it themselves. The engagement is live today: 19 workstreams since 2024 spanning homepage redesigns, mega menu, PLP updates, SEO, and performance.
Fast Orange: before and after.
Fast Orange lived on a corporate brand page inside ITW’s template. I designed and built it a home of its own at fastorangeclean.com, with a product-first hero, a design system in the brand’s voice, and a clear path to purchase.
Spray Nine and Versachem: same playbook.
Each brand got the same treatment: audit the inherited site, rebuild the brand voice, design a product-first system, and launch a site that sells.
Interplay Learning.
An Austin ed-tech company, given the same end-to-end treatment: landing pages, email systems, and brand.
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