Turning Taco Bell Customization Into Fan Expression

Fan Style transformed Taco Bell customization into an experience where fans could turn their favorite orders into something they could name, save, and share.What began as an effort to encourage more sharing became a broader exploration of how customization could become a form of self-expression giving fans something personal enough to share beyond the transaction.

Lead Product Designer, Shop Pod | 2025

As Lead Product Designer for the Shop Pod, I led the native app experience from early concept through launch shaping the creation, saving, and sharing flows while working across Product, Engineering, Marketing, Legal, Analytics, Social, and Global Bell Creative.

Opportunity

What would make a customized order feel worth sharing in the first place?

We wanted creating a Fan Style to feel like a natural extension of ordering rather than another experience customers had to learn.After customizing an item, fans could turn their creation into a Fan Style, give it a name, save it, and receive a personalized style card designed for sharing.Connecting creation directly to an existing behavior, ordering Taco Bell the way you like it, kept the experience simple while giving fans something more personal to take away from it.

Creating Something Worth Sharing

A Fan Style needed to feel personal, but it also needed to feel unmistakably Taco Bell.I helped establish the product design direction and defined the structure, layout, and constraints for the Fan Style cards. I then partnered with Global Bell Creative to bring more personality into the experience through typography, gradients, and custom artwork while reviewing the creative for accessibility and technical feasibility.Those same layouts and assets extended into social sharing giving fans a polished way to share their creations with friends and followers.

Balancing Recognition With Brand Safety

Giving fans a way to create and share something of their own introduced another design challenge: how much freedom should the experience provide?Rather than relying on unrestricted imagery, we partnered with Global Bell Creative to develop artwork that let fans create something expressive while maintaining a consistent visual system.Fan Style names and shareable assets could still feel personal, but the overall experience remained recognizable as Taco Bell.

Designing for Recognition

Fan Style wasn't only about creation. The experience also explored how fans could be recognized for the things they made.Ultimately, Taco Bell gave fans the opportunity to have select Fan Styles considered for the national menu alongside other forms of recognition and rewards. The public launch also allowed Rewards members to earn points when other customers ordered their creations.That extended the experience beyond sharing for its own sake. A fan-created order could potentially inspire someone else to try it and even become part of Taco Bell itself.

From Fan Style to the National Menu

That promise eventually became real.Taco Bell reported more than 40,000 Fan Style submissions from which three fan-created items were ultimately selected for nationwide limited-time availability: the California Crunchwrap, Cantina Craze, and Burrito Bliss.The result created a connection between digital and physical experiences. Fans weren't only sharing what they made. Their creativity could influence what Taco Bell customers across the country could actually order.

Outcome

Fans created 40,000+ Fan Styles demonstrating how an everyday product behavior like customization could become something more expressive, shareable, and connected to the Taco Bell brand.Fan Style also received earned media coverage including Fast Company and People Magazine.Beyond the initial launch, the experience gave us a foundation for thinking more broadly about personalization, sharing, user-generated content, moderation, and fan participation within Taco Bell's digital products.

How This Shaped My Approach

Fan Style reinforced for me that some of the strongest digital experiences don't sit neatly within traditional product or brand boundaries.Creating something fans would want to personalize and share meant bringing together product design, brand expression, social behavior, technical realities, and safety considerations.It also strengthened how I work across disciplines bringing different teams together around a customer experience that needed to work as both a product and an expression of the brand.

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