Melissa is a design leader with 19 years of experience connecting behavior, emotion and mindset with innovative experiences.
She is the CEO and founder of Charette — a design and strategy studio helping leaders achieve sustainable growth by creating the right products that connect to customers with resonant messages. Most recently she was the Head of Design at Clearing, where her ethnographic research on Chronic Pain was published in the Dove Press Journal of Medicine. Before that, she was a founding member and chief Experience Officer of Ellevest — an award-winning financial product designed to get more money in the hands of women.
Her work helped Ellevest scale to $1B in AUM while winning awards for brand, user experience and product from FastCompany and InterBrand. She was featured along with her team on the cover of Money Magazine and personally named an Industry Innovator by AdWeek.
Her earlier work includes the design and product reinvention of Vogue.com which became the backbone for the content management system for Condé Nast, the digital experience of SiriusXM and some of the earliest iterations of AmericanExpress.com.
She’s skilled in behavioral research, experience design, product strategy and brand vision.
