Product and E-commerce Lead · AB1GK (AB1 Sports) · Mar 2019 - ongoing
Building AB1GK's brand and ecommerce experience from zero, solo
Since 2019, I've led product and e-commerce for AB1GK, the goalkeeper gear brand founded by Premier League goalkeeper Asmir Begovic - designing the brand identity and logo from a blank page, then building and still leading the ecommerce experience that sells it, working directly with the founder, from discovery through devops.
Team
Just me, working directly with founder Asmir Begovic
Scope
Brand identity, logo, ecommerce platform, ongoing product and maintenance
Constraint
One-person team covering discovery through design, development, and devops
Duration
Mar 2019 - ongoing, still an active, growing business
The problem
In March 2019, AB1 didn't exist - no brand, no logo, no website, just a professional goalkeeper's idea to build his own gear company. I designed the brand identity from scratch working directly with founder Asmir Begovic, then designed and built the ecommerce platform, launched that November, that would sell it. The real challenge was never any single design problem - it was that I've led product and e-commerce as a one-person team since day one, working directly with the founder: discovery, design, development, devops, and now years of ongoing maintenance and marketing, for a real business that today processes hundreds of transactions a day.
Process
Designed the brand identity around something personal, not borrowed
Asmir and I worked through moodboards and sketches together, nearly daily, deliberately steering away from anything that looked like an existing goalkeeper or sportswear brand. The logo I pushed for overlaps the letters A and B to form the number 1 in the negative space between them - the number every goalkeeper wears, and the number Asmir wore through his own career. It's the one piece of the identity that couldn't belong to anyone else's brand.
Built the ecommerce platform on WooCommerce, then engineered around its limits
The store runs on WooCommerce, heavily customized. None of the real requirements were things it handled out of the box: dynamic pricing and shipping by country or promo code, an auction format for select drops, separate pricing tiers for retailers versus regular customers, disabling sales in specific countries for distribution and rights reasons, and custom reporting the default plugins didn't offer. Most of the real product work here was engineering around a platform's limits, not styling its defaults.
Stayed the sole product owner through years of scale and turnover
From the first sketch to today, I've owned discovery, design, development, devops, and ongoing maintenance myself, including through periods when the company brought in other leadership. Keeping that end-to-end ownership consistent - instead of letting the product fragment across whoever joined next - is most of why the site still works the way it was designed to.
Kept redesigning the ecommerce experience long after the initial build
My responsibilities as product and e-commerce lead covered the brand identity, the ecommerce experience, implementation, and ongoing improvements, working directly with founder Asmir Begovic rather than as part of a larger team. One of the clearer threads of that ongoing work was redesigning the landing pages and checkout experience - Google Analytics showed overall conversion increasing from 1.7% to 3.2% afterward, a gain of 1.5 percentage points. Advertising changes ran alongside that redesign too, so it's a combined result, not something I'd attribute to the design work alone.
Selected screens
Key decisions
Defended a personal, ownable logo over the safer option
The easy version of this logo borrows visual language from established goalkeeper or sportswear brands - it reads as credible immediately, with less risk. I pushed instead for the A/B/1 mark specifically because it couldn't be mistaken for anyone else's, even though that meant more rounds of exploration before it clicked. It's become the one piece of the brand nobody has ever second-guessed since.
Outcome
1.7% → 3.2%
overall site conversion rate per Google Analytics, after redesigning the landing pages and checkout experience - a combined result alongside advertising changes, not attributable to design alone
Zero to full brand
identity, logo, and ecommerce experience built from nothing, solo, starting in 2019
Hundreds of orders/day
the store now processes hundreds of transactions daily
One lead, years running
discovery through devops and maintenance, held by one person as product and e-commerce lead the entire time
The conversion figure is from Google Analytics. Advertising changes ran alongside the landing page and checkout redesign, so this is a combined result, not an improvement attributable to design alone. The other outcomes here are described qualitatively.
What I’d do differently
“Most product advice assumes a team around you - other designers to sanity-check decisions, a PM to push back on scope, analysts to separate what your work actually drove from everything else happening at the same time. None of that existed here; it was just me and a founder. The habit that mattered most wasn't any single decision, it was discipline: being honest about what a result like a conversion lift actually came from, when advertising changed in the same window as the design, instead of taking the cleaner version of the story because no one else was there to ask harder questions.”