Solventum

Before designing anything, I needed to understand the organization: its people, its customers, its tensions. I designed and led a global research program across two tracks.

Conversations ranged from the CMO to channel marketing managers internally, and from chief medical officers to directors of corporate accounts externally. The goal was to map not just what people thought, but where assumptions diverged.

The findings converged into a set of personas that captured both internal and external audiences. These became the shared reference point for every strategic decision that followed.

One of the most consequential findings: employees and customers alike associated 3M with industrial materials, not healthcare. The brand equity was real, but it wasn’t transferable. 3M’s industrial materials division had also had some recent legal controversy, so there was even more incentive to move away from that brand.

This fed directly into the strategy team’s brand architecture. The recommendation was clear: a net-new identity would give Solventum the freedom to position itself as a healthcare-first company. The brand design team then created the logo and visual identity, along with the design system that my team would later use as the foundation for the website.

That identity became Solventum. Their mission — enabling better, smarter, safer healthcare to improve lives — became the grounding principle for everything we built.

The research and audit surfaced two core challenges: the depth and breadth of content made it difficult for audiences to find what they needed, and the existing web presence failed to communicate purpose. I synthesized these into three strategic territories and then facilitated a workshop to pressure-test each territory. The goal wasn’t to pick one, but to identify which elements resonated and what was realistic given launch constraints.

Territory 3, An Intelligent Assistant, became the foundation, but it absorbed key qualities from the other two. The editorial storytelling from Territory 1 and the integrated content approach from Territory 2 were carried forward, making the final direction richer than any single territory on its own.

From there, I developed the brand experience strategy: a vision and three experience principles that would govern every design and content decision going forward.

This framework became the backbone of the website, the brand center, and every digital deliverable that followed.

The website was the most urgent deliverable. Solventum needed a public-facing digital presence ready for their April 2024 launch, and their existing 3M.com presence had significant UX issues and an organizational structure that didn’t map to their new identity.

Development

Content development had to run in parallel with site development due to the compressed timeline. I created a high-level content framework that aligned both workstreams early, preventing the misalignment that typically plagues parallel workflows.

My team developed wireframes as a modular component library: reusable parts that could scale across the full site and support future use cases beyond the MVP. Since Solventum used their own development team, the handoff was fully digital: Figma for styles and spacing, and written annotations for details like character counts and responsive behavior.

The website was one output. The brand center was the system behind it.

I led the development of Solventum’s brand center as an internal platform that housed everything my team and I had built: the strategic vision, experience principles, site architecture, and the digital component library, all structured so their in-house team could pick it up and run with it. It wasn’t documentation; it was a strategic north star for all future development.

After the public launch workstreams were underway, the client asked me to take on an additional phase focused on the internal brand experience, a direct result of the trust built during the earlier phases.

The employee brand work followed the same research-driven methodology. I conducted a new round of global employee interviews, developed a more detailed set of employee personas, and proposed activation concepts to help Solventum bring the brand to life internally during what was, for many employees, a long-awaited yet monumental transition.

The research phase surfaced an insight that extended beyond digital: Solventum wouldn’t have their own physical spaces for one to two years after the spinoff. In that gap, they still needed a way to bring their story to investors, key customer segments, and the press.

I proposed a mobile innovation center: a trailer outfitted with digital screens that could flip content based on audience type and industry. My team and I designed the spatial flow, developed the content strategy for the interactive exhibitions, and created the concept for handoff to the client's implementation team.

This wasn’t a website problem. It was a brand experience problem that required thinking across channels, audiences, and physical constraints. The research made it possible to design for all three.