Faceswap Cards

A short project to improve e-comm conversion

Project Summary

Face Swap was an industry-first AI innovation that transformed personalised greeting cards by allowing customers to seamlessly insert faces from their own photos into creator-designed templates. Delivered in just six weeks, the project combined emerging AI technology with thortful’s playful brand to create a unique customer experience that drove engagement, commercial growth, and strengthened support for independent creators.

Impact

The launch of Face Swap successfully demonstrated the commercial value of AI-powered personalisation. Customers who purchased a Face Swap card generated a 2% uplift in average order value, while 12,000 customers created almost 60,000 face swaps, averaging five creations each. This resulted in nearly 5,000 Face Swap card purchases, representing approximately 6% of all app card sales, validating both strong customer engagement and demand for the feature.

Uplift in AoV

2%

% of customers using Apple pay

15%

Overal conversion gains

0.2ppt

My role

As the sole Product Designer, I led the end-to-end UX for the project from discovery through to MVP launch in just six weeks ahead of Valentine’s Day.

Working closely with Product and Engineering, I was responsible for:

Defining the product vision and customer experience.
Leading customer research and concept validation.
Designing the complete end-to-end journey.
Creating prototypes and testing concepts.
Working alongside engineers to balance technical feasibility with customer experience.
Iterating the experience based on launch feedback and analytics

Problem definition

Personalisation has always been central to thortful’s proposition, but traditional photo cards had become a relatively mature product with limited opportunity for differentiation. At the same time, generative AI was rapidly becoming mainstream, presenting an opportunity to introduce a new type of personalised greeting card experience.

The challenge was to identify an AI-powered feature that felt genuinely valuable rather than gimmicky—something customers would understand, enjoy and be willing to pay for whilst remaining true to thortful’s creative brand and supporting its independent creators.

Customer Problems

Through research we identified several opportunities:

Customers wanted more fun and memorable ways to personalise cards beyond simply uploading a photograph.
Existing photo cards lacked novelty and surprise.
Many customers wanted cards that felt more unique and shareable.
Customers were unfamiliar with AI-powered experiences, meaning the journey needed to feel incredibly simple and trustworthy.
There were concerns around privacy and how uploaded photos would be used.

Research

Before exploring technical feasibility, I wanted to validate whether this was a problem worth solving.

I conducted interviews with loyal customers alongside workshops with Marketing and Customer Happiness to understand customer expectations, potential concerns and the wider business opportunity.

Some of the key questions we explored included:

What type of AI-generated content would customers actually enjoy?
Would customers trust AI with their personal photos?
How should we communicate the feature without overwhelming users?
How would this impact thortful’s creator community?
Was this a scalable long-term proposition?

Concept Validation

Option 1 - Ai generated Cards

The first concept explored was giving customers complete creative freedom by allowing them to generate an entirely new greeting card using AI prompts. Customers could enter a description such as “Create a birthday card of my dad riding a dinosaur in the style of an 80s action movie” and the AI would generate both the artwork and potentially the accompanying copy.

POC to get early buy in

Option2 - Creator led Faceswap templates

The second concept focused on enhancing existing creator-designed cards rather than replacing them. Customers could upload a photo and use AI to seamlessly swap the face of a celebrity, character or illustrated figure with the face of a friend or family member.
This approach combined the excitement of AI with a familiar and intuitive personalisation journey. Rather than asking customers to create something from scratch, they simply selected a design they loved and transformed it into something uniquely personal. It also preserved the role of thortful’s independent creators by building on their existing artwork instead of generating entirely new designs.

Proposed Solution

We ultimately chose Option 2: Creator-Led Face Swap Templates because it complemented thortful’s existing marketplace rather than competing with it. By allowing customers to insert faces into artwork created by our independent creators, we could harness the excitement of AI while preserving the creativity and personality that make thortful unique.

This approach also enabled creators to continue producing topical, humorous, and culturally relevant designs that resonated with customers throughout the year, while AI acted as an enhancement to their work rather than a replacement. From a customer perspective, the concept was immediately understood, required very little learning, and delivered a fun, personalised experience that felt authentic to the thortful brand. From a business perspective, it strengthened our creator ecosystem, reduced the risks associated with fully AI-generated content, and provided a scalable platform for introducing new Face Swap designs across occasions and trends.

Final Designs