MasterBrand – Rebode
Rebode: a new consumer brand that gets kitchen remodels unstuck
My role: Product vision and concept, leader of UX, visual design, content strategy and product management.
MasterBrand (NYSE: MBC) is North America’s largest cabinet manufacturer, and like most commodity businesses, it had no relationship with consumers. Leadership’s question was simple: how do we use digital to build a lifelong consumer relationship?
Cabinets are the costliest choice in a kitchen, yet most homeowners can’t name a brand, and struggle with juggling chocies. People stall in the “dreaming” stage for years. MBC had no way to reduce that friction… until we built one.
Problem: Remodels stall because decisions get stuck in a loop, and cabinet brands never show up to help or steer business their way.
Solution: A new consumer brand with an array of experiences that owns the remodel journey upstream of the order.
Benefit: Homeowners get unstuck, more remodels happen; MasterBrand plays a role before the cabinets are chosen.
Results during my tenure:
Thousands of homeowner accounts – MBC finally owns the relationship before an order.
Millions in potential cabinet demand cultivated and captured through Rebode profiles.
Retailers nationwide incorporating Rebode in their sales process, even in-store.
We did our homework and proposed a different way of thinking.
Excerpts from our analysis and strategy proposal, presented to CEO and CDO.
The solution called for simple, powerful and meaningful experiences, reducing homeowner reliance on 3rd-party experts.
We prescribed ways to think and act like a consumer brand.
We shouldn’t rely on 3rd party cabinet dealers to be our marketing engine.
Remodeling is a difficult process full of friction – we can fix that.
Instead of disappearing after the order, what if we kept providing value?
We proposed a remodel-centric business to reach homeowners.
I began to envision a product, so I personally prototyped it to get feedback (we had no team yet). After some great input, this became a Board of Directors pitch, and we got their green light to pursue it. Here are a few screens.
Show their choices on THEIR kitchen.
Turn choices into a portable project brief.
Make it fun and exploratory.
Solve the 3 biggest remodel puzzles.
We built a 50-person team, a consumer brand, and launched in 8 months.
Go-to-market: We didn’t launch as MasterBrand. Cabinets are MBC’s context; the whole remodel was ours. Rebode gave us a modern face and permission to invent the experience without wearing a $3B public mantel.
We crafted the Rebode brand to be a beacon of clarity, our promise that remodeling will be creative and fun, not frustrating.
Our flagship experience: ‘Jumpstarter’.
The core of the Rebode: Jumpstarter was our launch into market – a guided path through the three decisions that unblock a remodel: style (33 aesthetics), design (layout + lifestyle), and budget (where you do/don’t invest).
We launched the Rebode platform in 8 months. Design/UX, engineering, data science, and analytics building together for the first time.
Motivation, scope, timing, clarifies the project.
2 style paths: a quiz or AI analysis of a fave photo.
4 questions match to 1 of our 33 beautiful styles.
Show the style in gorgeous kitchen photography.
Dial in your style through 4 aesthetic spectrums.
Match lifestyles to kitchen functionality concepts.
Budgets reflect opportunities and tradeoffs.
The final budget = your priorities quantified.
Connect with pros that carry MBC products, the Rebode work used as the perfect project brief.
Plus, 2 more ways to explore: Rebode Vision (real-time 3D), and Try On Your Style (AI photo reskinning).
Next, we launched ‘Try On Your Style’.
Reskinning your existing kitchen: Try On Your Style uses highly-sophisticated Gen-AI to show how your dream kitchen would look. Just take a photo and in seconds your kitchen is transformed.
We articulated each of our 33 styles for deft prompt engineering, and the platform even deletes images that aren’t good enough. It also tries hard to match the camera angle and composition. No AI-slop.
We have great engagement with this feature, people spending upwards of 30 minutes creating, recreating, saving and sending.
Current, outdated kitchen transformed into a mid-century beauty.
Perhaps a sleek, modern galley with minimal details and lots of daylight.
Or a soft, modern contemporary with natural materials.
And it works great on mobile, too.
And late 2025, ‘Rebode Vision’.
Real-time, in-browser 3D visualization: It’s the holy grail of product demos. Nothing beats the experience of controlling the view, changing the layout, zooming in, experimenting with materials and colors. In the world of home remodeling, there are many room visualizers – none do what we did.
Vision takes your style and layout and builds a fully interactive 3D scene, rendered in your browser, instantaneously… with SKU-accurate MasterBrand products. This was a monumental effort by over a dozen team members.
Per our lead engineer (and major talent) Alejandro Ugalde: “Three.js/React Three Fiber rendering engine, performance benchmarks and monitoring for mobile and desktop, asset strategy (formats, textures, compression, blob storage, loader timing), API and endpoint design with latency monitoring, Zustand store…” and more. Took a team of 8 a year to go from POC to published.
While I can’t show the document in detail, I wrote an Experience Brief to articulate our goals, assess the competition, provide compelling examples from the world beyond cabinets, and rally the team to do more than anyone had done in our space before.
I mapped visualizers across Visual Quality and Integration into the business of remodels.
Everyone shoots for upper right quadrant. Full integration with Jumpstarter was how we’d do it.
This taught lessons about what we needed to make, and gave us a mantra (orange box).
We looked beyond kitchens so no preconceptions were allowed about “good enough”.