Fullscript Daily Packs
Fullscript's first physical product — personalized supplement packs. I designed the category from zero.
- Role
- Product Designer — Team Cura
- Timeline
- November 2022 – January 2024
- Team
- 1 Product lead · 1 Engineering manager · 1 Designer (me) · Cura engineering squad · Fulfillment, legal, brand and ops partners
- Scope
- Pack builder · Practitioner and patient PDPs · Packaging and booklet · Checkout shipping UX · Catalog photography direction · In-app marketing placements
My role
- Wrote the relevance boards and mapped the four core flows before the first build sprint — then wrote the product-page requirements doc myself when the PDPs needed a spec.
- Designed the pack builder: template starting points, a from-scratch pill catalog, and physical-world limits enforced as interface.
- Designed the trust layer for a first-party product: practitioner-first attribution, per-patient product pages, and legally reviewed content details.
- Designed the physical touchpoints — the booklet, the personalized header pouch, and checkout copy that taught a new shipping model in one line.
- Art-directed the 28-pill catalog photography, Fullscript's first in-app content photography.
TL;DR
In short
Problem
Patients on a supplement regimen manage a countertop of bottles — 37% reported re-ordering problems, 31% couldn't sort which pills to take when — while practitioners wanted the opposite of a catalog: "exactly what is needed for my patient. No more, no less."
Approach
Segment research and flow mapping first, then the full surface of a physical category — a pack builder inside the prescribing flow, new product pages, packaging, and shipping UX — through a scope negotiation that traded catalog integration for a direct path into a draft plan.
Outcome
Patients who received a pack in their first treatment plan ordered at roughly 55% — about 7 points above comparable first plans. The category ran 18 months and was retired at its highest-volume month.
Context and problem
The situation we walked into
Business context
In late 2022 Fullscript decided to sell something it had never made: its own product, personalized strips of daily supplement pouches filled and shipped under the Fullscript name. A fulfillment partner handled the physical side, but the agreement required the entire experience to read as native Fullscript — no co-branding to lean on, no partner documentation to link out to. The design surface was the product.
User context
Practitioners recommending 3 to 6 products per patient wanted exact-dose regimens without brand-hunting: "I want to create 'just right' formulas that involve the exact dosages I recommend." Patients wanted to stop sorting pills — a third of those surveyed struggled with re-ordering, portability, or remembering what to take when.
Constraints and complexity
Physical-product rules shaped every screen: a 27-character print limit at the fulfillment facility, legal liability on practitioner-typed pack names, inventory so fragile a pilot wave was held back for it. And the original catalog integration was cut early to control scope — discoverability had to be designed back in.
Goals and success metrics
What success looked like
Prove a new product category: get practitioners prescribing packs weekly and patients converting on pack plans at or above the platform baseline.
Success criteria
- 10% of practitioners exposed to daily packs send at least 1 pack plan per week.
- 50%+ of patients prescribed a pack order it — at or above the standard-plan baseline.
- Staged US rollout: internal dress rehearsal with real orders, then 50 practitioners, then 400.
- Every release killswitch-able — static packs could be pulled the moment inventory ran low.
Approach
How we got there
- 01
Wrote the boards before the screens
I wrote the relevance boards that defined who this was for — virtual prescribers, where 42% of prescriptions carry exact dosages — and mapped the four core flows before the first build sprint. When the product pages needed a spec, I wrote the requirements doc myself; the release notes credit it by name.
- 02
Traded the catalog for a direct action
Early explorations integrated packs into the catalog. That was cut to control scope — custom packs exist per practitioner, a concept the search and catalog infrastructure couldn't hold — so discoverability became a direct action that opens a draft plan on the packs tab. The record is honest: "this got axed to reduce scope."
- 03
Shipped in waves with the killswitch armed
A dress rehearsal placed real orders through the fulfillment pipeline on May 2, 2023. Fifty practitioners went live May 16, four hundred by mid-June, customizable packs on August 28, templates November 15. The August date held through a lost replenishment shipment, a teammate's departure, and a threatened scope cut — all in one July week.
- 04
Read the data fast, aimed design at it
Two weeks after the August launch the numbers were blunt: a handful of practitioners had explored the builder, and almost none had prescribed. Every design move that followed — a guided tour, an awareness banner, templates — targeted first use. When leadership paused templates, our memo reversed it within a week: the design was already done and kept component-fresh, which made saying yes cheap.
Key decisions
Forks in the road
Catalog integration vs a tab with a direct action
Packs-in-the-catalog was the discoverable option and the expensive one: custom packs exist per practitioner, and a product that exists in one store but not all stores broke the search model. A dedicated tab was buildable — and invisible.
- Decision
- Packs shipped in their own tab, with a direct action that opens a draft treatment plan as the discovery path.
- Tradeoff
- Discoverability became the category's structural weakness — much of my later work bought back what this cut cost.
Gut-first v1 vs formal usability
A three-person core team, an unprecedented category, and no live users to test against. Formal studies would have burned weeks testing guesses. The alternative was shipping from judgment and instrumenting everything.
- Decision
- We built the first iteration from gut, then validated with internal and external testing parties across desktop, mobile, and embedded surfaces.
- Tradeoff
- Real usability truth arrived only after launch — and the first post-launch numbers were humbling.
Practitioner as the brand
A first-party product with an invisible fulfillment partner needs a trust anchor. Leading with a product brand meant explaining a brand nobody knew; leading with the practitioner meant the person patients already trust does the explaining.
- Decision
- "Personalized for you by Dr. {Name}" replaced the brand line, backed by an Only on Fullscript badge and a product page generated per patient.
- Tradeoff
- Personalization promises met physical limits — a 27-character print constraint cut practitioner names from the booklet one day before launch.
Solution
What we shipped
Outcomes and impact
What it moved
First-plan conversion
≈55%
+7 pts vs comparable first plans
Custom packs built
2,100+
Every one a practitioner-designed formulation.
Weekly prescriber adoption
~1%
vs a 10% goal
The honest miss — first use, not retention, was the bottleneck. Roughly 15% of practitioners who tried the builder became weekly users.
Category lifespan
18 months
Retired at its highest-volume month — an operating-model call, not a demand collapse.
Business impact
Pack plans converted above the platform baseline from launch — 56% at the pilot against a 46–50% target — and custom packs overtook the fixed-formula originals by mid-2024, validating the customization bet the roadmap was built on. The category was retired in late 2024 as physical-product economics caught up with a deliberately gated pilot.
User impact
Practitioners who adopted, stayed: weekly active prescribers tripled after launch even as the eligible pool grew five times larger. Patients got a single personalized strip of pouches instead of a countertop of bottles — and ordered it at higher rates than comparable first recommendations.
In their words
What people said
“Emile Patry Blenkiron designed a whole new way of interacting with and recommending supplements on our Fullscript platform. He also designed a simple but beautiful experience for daily pack patients. And he did it with exactly 156 stakeholders and 75 new releases to account for. Your designs are wonderful but your ability to process and action feedback is equally as impressive.”
Lisa Gamwell — Product Lead, Fullscript “The design for the builder is one of the most challenging UX pieces I have seen, and you navigated it amazingly!”
Vlad Kalashnyk — Engineering Manager, Fullscript
Learnings and reflections
What I’d take with me
The hand-picked pilot was the wrong pilot — and that was the finding
Sales selected 50 ideal-profile practitioners for wave one; they produced a single adopter, while 350 randomly chosen accounts produced eighteen. The holdouts' unanimous ask — let me customize it — became the entire second release. A pilot that falsifies your segment hypothesis is doing its job.
Retention proved the design; activation starved it
The practitioners who tried the builder kept using it. The ones who never opened it were the whole problem — the tour, the banner, and templates tripled weekly actives without widening the funnel's mouth. In a 0→1, first use is the metric design owns.
A physical category is designed everywhere except the screen
The feature we cut on launch eve died to a 27-character print limit, pack naming was shaped by liability law, and the strongest re-order prompt we shipped was an empty pouch. The deliverables that made this product real never appeared in a Figma file.