sophia ho

Toronto

Back to all work

Greenhouse

Year
2025–2026
Role
Lead Designer
Team
Innovation
With
Sole Designer

(tl;dr)

1 design library shipped
60+ packaging designs shipped

Introduction

The Greenhouse team handing out samples at Union Station
Union Station
Greenhouse booth at a trade show, with the team behind the table
Trade show
Sophia and a teammate beside a giant Fiery Ginger bottle at a summer social
Summer social

Welcome to a small selection of what I worked on at Greenhouse. 20+ projects are unreleased. One day they will be released into the world. Thanks for visiting!

Greenhouse Juice Brand System: the Renders page with filters for CA, FR and USA and a grid of product rendersimages/greenhouse/thumb-design-library.jpg

Design libraries
Plant milk packaging project thumbnailimages/greenhouse/thumb-plant-milk.jpg

Plant milk packaging
01

Design libraries

Overview

Greenhouse Juice Brand System: sidebar with Overview, Foundations, Photos, Renders and Icons, and the Renders page showing a grid of product rendersimages/greenhouse/design-library-thumbnails.jpg
Organized 12+ years of design assets into one consolidated design library, usable for all teams.

Design research

  1. Conducting User Interviews

  2. Digital Shadowing

  3. Feedback Loops (later step)

01 Conducting user interviews

I interviewed 8 people across different teams, in internals, marketing, sales including the chief of staff!

Challenge: Not all users could verbalize their pain points, since their process hadn’t changed in the last 12 years. So I pivoted to probing questions. For example, instead of:

“Do you find it easy to locate the design assets you need?”

I would avoid yes and no answers to ask more specific questions:

“How long does it typically take you to verify if an asset is the most up-to-date version?”

“I saw you opened four different folders before finding that ginger shot render. How did you know which folder to check first?”

I separated all their pain points, and brainstormed potential solutions.

Affinity board of sticky notes in four columns (Sales, Marketing, Internal, Design). Top row: what each team asked for. Middle row: what each team wants (renders, photos, videos, barcodes; fonts, branding outline, SOPs, templates; icons, presentation templates; sample copy, fruit illustrations, icons, certifications). Bottom row: the design takeaway for each team, such as a sorted library of digital assets and separate templates.

02 Digital shadowing

When interviews were getting a little difficult for some users I would pivot to digital shadowing. I would ask them for a prompt, and for them to share their screen.

Shared drive folder path for a US plant milk file, with the folder levels underlined in redimages/greenhouse/research-digital-shadowing.jpg

No naming convention

7 clicks to find a file

Low fidelity design

Key findings to solve:

  1. Define a strict naming convention
  2. Resolve file discoverability issue
  3. Establish reusable templates to streamline future asset creation

I created low fidelity sketches & organized a folder system and naming convention for the files. I used Figma Make to mass create low fidelity iterations of the design asset library.

Notebook wireframe sketches of the design library: dividers, asset cards, colours, fonts and folders of assets
Low fidelity Greenhouse Juice Brand System, Renders page: sidebar with Overview, Foundations, Photos, Renders, Icons, Templates and SOPs, filters for All, CA, FR and USA, a search bar and a grid of juice bottle renders Low fidelity Icons page with filters for All, Logos, GH Icons and Certifications, and a grid of hand-drawn Greenhouse icons Low fidelity Templates page with filters for All, Presentation, Email and Print, and cards for General Presentation, 360 Template, E-Blast Template and Discount Card Low fidelity Presentation Slides template page with a Use Template button and an olive green title slide preview
Page 1 of 4 · Click to shuffle through the low fidelity pages.

03 Feedback loops

As adoption was expected to be 100%, I highly valued employee feedback. I gained feedback in 3 ways:

  1. Workshops
  2. Anonymous Ticket System
  3. Bi-weekly 1 on 1s

Workshops

Facilitated two interactive, hybrid Lunch & Learn sessions attracting over 20 participants per session. To drive hands-on adoption, participants completed live activities within the platform, such as building custom slide decks. Each session wrapped up with a Q&A session to gain direct feedback.

Chat grid of teammates sharing presentation slides, charts and reactions in a workshop
Lunch + Learn recap card from October 17, 2025, 12:00 to 12:30 pm, with Transcript and Attendance links and a 34 minute recording

Anonymous Ticket System

Built an anonymous SharePoint ticket system to allow team members to submit ideas asynchronously. Collected 20+ feature suggestions and improvements through this channel.

SharePoint list called Marketing + Design Requests with columns for Unassigned items (1) and New Request (38)

Bi-weekly 1 on 1s

Established bi-weekly 1:1s with leadership to present ongoing progress, refine design deliverables, and ensure strategic goal alignment. These sessions also gathered executive leadership feedback and informal insights regarding the application.

Final designs

With this wealth of research, it was time to bring the designs to life!

Challenge: Translating complex design systems and final mock ups into a fully functional, production-ready codebase without a dedicated front end engineering team.

Solution: Leveraged AI development assistants (Claude and Gemini) to accelerate front end implementation, troubleshoot code constraints, and rapidly build functional prototypes matching design specifications. I would use Gemini to create very specific prompts catered to Claude & screenshots to my design and then enter them into Claude.

Greenhouse Juice Brand System, Foundations page: colour swatches, typography scale and logo lockups (recreated)
The designs shown are a remake, since the originals are confidential.

Metrics

~4hours of work reduced per week per employee
~3×faster to ship designs
100%adoption in a team of 200 employees

Project testimonies

Fiena Yuimages/greenhouse/testimony-1.jpg
Fiena YuBrand Manager
Sophia did an amazing job building our design library. Bringing all brand assets into one clear, organized hub has made our work so much more efficient and consistent.
Jarka Roseimages/greenhouse/testimony-2.jpg
Jarka RoseSales Manager
Sophia thoughtfully brought together our brand assets into a comprehensive design library that helped us achieve a more unified look across everything we do.

Reflections

Hands-on research was essential for this project. Speaking directly with the marketing team uncovered a critical pain point around asset reuse that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

If I had more time… I would create an automated sell sheet generator.

Hand-drawn sketch of the automated sell sheet generator: a chat-prompt style layout on the left, and on the right a product picker with CA, USA and FR tabs
Early sketch: a chat-prompt style generator, and a picker for which products are needed.
02

Plant milk packaging design

Overview

Led the packaging design for the Greenhouse x Erewhon plant milk creamer collection, translating brand synergy into striking visual assets within an aggressive 3-week turnaround.

The Greenhouse plant milk creamer collection: unsweetened oat, almond, oat, and vanilla oat cartonsimages/greenhouse/plant-milk-lineup.jpg

Design research

  1. Leadership’s vision
  2. Looking at previous designs

Before designing, I wanted to clarify scope and what leadership’s design vision was for these products. Through back and forth asking, I was able to clarify:

01 CEO’s vision

The Beverly Hills Hotel sign against palm treesimages/greenhouse/plant-milk-hotel-sign.jpg
The Beverly Hills Hotel entrance with green striped awning and red carpetimages/greenhouse/plant-milk-hotel-entrance.jpg

The only asset he provided

Challenge: this was super abstract. How can a hotel translate into a plant milk design?

Solution: I clarified, and he liked the luxury feeling and colours, and the feeling of California.

Building on this feedback, I dove into the heritage of The Beverly Hills Hotel, the historic “Pink Palace” established in 1912, to anchor the product in a sun-soaked, timeless California aesthetic.

Pink cabanas and a turquoise pool under palm trees at the Beverly Hills Hotelimages/greenhouse/plant-milk-hotel-pool.jpg

02 Marketing manager’s vision

Chobani creamers as a competitor, plus current Erewhon and top US plant milks.

A grid of colourful Chobani coffee creamer cartonsimages/greenhouse/plant-milk-chobani-lineup.jpg

Bold colours

Ingredients as a defining motif

03 The plant milk archive

Everything still needed to be within Greenhouse designs and match our portfolio, so I went deep into the archives to look into our current designs. Here is what I noticed:

Four earlier Greenhouse plant milk cartons: almond, unsweetened almond, oat and zero sugar oatimages/greenhouse/plant-milk-archive-lineup.jpg

True to nature tones

Hero ingredient as a wallpaper

Sophia presenting packaging designs on a tablet to the CEO and leadership teamimages/greenhouse/plant-milk-team.jpg

Process

Iterate, iterate, iterate

With the tight deadline, there was lots of back and forth. Towards the end of the sprint, I presented my design to the CEO and leadership team.

Final designs

After 3 weeks of hard work, we finally shipped off the beautiful products to sunny Los Angeles, California.

Final plant milk creamer packaging lineupimages/greenhouse/plant-milk-lineup.jpg
A shopping basket full of the new Greenhouse plant milksimages/greenhouse/plant-milk-basket.jpg
Photo of the Greenhouse oat creamers on a store shelf, priced at $5.99

LOOKN AT YR HARD WORK

NO WAYYYYY

AHHH

IT LOOKSSSS SO GOOF

GOOD

Metrics

41K+USD sold to distributors between Feb–Sept 2026.
6dyelines created & owned following USDA guidelines.
3weeks of ideation, design & revision.

Testimonials

Nirleen Gill
Nirleen GillSenior Marketing Manager
Sophia is an incredibly creative designer who consistently went above and beyond in her co‑op role. She frequently took on additional responsibilities and managed projects from start to finish. A true team player, Sophia is collaborative, open to feedback, and a pleasure to work with. She is always improving her design skills and proactively helped elevate the team. Her initiative, creativity, and positive attitude made a real impact on our team!