laser-cutting for all, and a new company vision.

laser-cutting for all, and a new company vision.

laser cutting for all, and a new company vision.

When I joined Cricut, the mission was bold: launch a consumer-grade laser cutter and reimagine the company’s software to make it accessible to people who had never touched a design tool in their lives.

But it quickly became clear this was bigger than one machine. The real opportunity was to redesign how people make—not just how they craft. And to transform Cricut’s platform from a creative toy into a desktop manufacturing system.

For secrecy's sake, machine photos are not those of the laser cutter, but are instead of Cricut Venture, another machine I launched while at Cricut.


2021-2024

When I joined Cricut, the mission was bold: launch a consumer-grade laser cutter and reimagine the company’s software to make it accessible to people who had never touched a design tool in their lives.


But it quickly became clear this was bigger than one machine. The real opportunity was to redesign how people make—not just how they craft. And to transform Cricut’s platform from a creative toy into a desktop manufacturing system.


For secrecy's sake, machine photos are not those of the laser cutter, but are instead of Cricut Venture, another machine I launched while at Cricut.


2021-2024

🔥 Design Space Reimagined

Making a laser cutter grandma-proof—and redefining the future of Cricut along the way

Originally hired to help launch Cricut’s first laser cutter, I ended up reshaping the future of the company’s entire software platform. This is the story of how we made cutting-edge tech accessible—and set a bold new direction for desktop manufacturing. </div>

🚀 The Mission

Bring laser cutting to everyday crafters

We weren’t building for makers or engineers. We were building for people who had never heard the word "kerf" in their lives. That meant:

  • Studying how people think about physical projects

  • Understanding where non-designers get stuck

  • Building a software experience that gave them confidence—not confusion

Laser cutting was the perfect test case: powerful, unfamiliar, and full of potential.

🧠 The Insight

People don’t design objects—they imagine outcomes

Most users don’t start with sketches. They start with a mental picture of a thing they want to hold. So we built tools that:

  • Showed a live preview of the final product

  • Surfaced only relevant tools at the right moment

  • Collapsed a 4-screen workflow into two clear modes: Design and Make

This wasn’t just software. It was a new mental model for making.

🛠️ The Process

A cross-functional sprint into new territory

We worked hand-in-hand with:

  • Hardware & firmware teams (to enable real-time visualization)

  • Legal & materials (to model what people could safely cut)

  • Design, research, and marketing (to ensure everything felt Cricut-worthy)

We built fast, tested hard, and made something that people loved—even if they didn’t know what a vector path was.

💥 The Curveball

The laser cutter was canceled one month before launch

But this wasn’t a loss—it was an inflection point.

The design patterns we developed for laser cutting became the new north star for all Cricut software. And I led the charge to turn it from a bold experiment into a company-wide strategy.

📐 The Vision That Lived On

From crafters to creators. From software to studio.

I proposed—and led—a total reimagining of Design Space:

  • ✅ Context-aware tools that adapt to what the user is doing

  • ✅ Visual-first workflows that reflect the physical product in real time

  • ✅ Two intuitive environments: Design and Make—no more bouncing between screens

It wasn’t just a UI refresh. It was a complete shift in how Cricut thinks about user experience, manufacturing, and creativity.

Every software team is now building against this framework. The work I led will ship to millions of users.

👇

I was hired to build for one product. I ended up designing a platform—and a future.
And it all started with a laser.

<