Manhattan 23rd Street Windows
Associate Creative Director/Art Director
The Home Depot's 23rd Street store sits squarely between 5th and 6th Avenues in the middle of one of the busiest blocks in Manhattan. The front windows face a street with a mid-block stoplight — which means every day, waves of New Yorkers stop directly in front of them and wait. For a retailer whose brand lives mostly inside warehouse walls, it's a rare and genuinely public creative stage.
I came onto this project in 2015 as one of several designers competing internally for the window concepts. I won enough consecutive pitches that Home Depot eventually stopped running the competition and handed the project to me outright. Over eleven years the windows have changed out five times annually — seasonal concepts, each one needing to stop a fast-moving New York sidewalk crowd in the few seconds they have before the light changes.
When I moved into the ACD role, I made a deliberate decision about what to do with it. Day-to-day agency work at the scale we operate tends toward the production end — template builds, minor revisions, execution work. Important, but not the kind of work that reveals what someone is really capable of. The window project became a way to change that. I started using it as a development assignment — briefing junior designers and art directors on concepts, letting them run with something highly visible and genuinely creative. It became one of the best tools I had for finding out who on the team had more in them than their daily work suggested.
Fifty-five installations. Still running.
