Leila Eisenmann
I like to simply define myself as a designer.
I was born and bred in Paris and have now a career of +20 years in design with 15 years dedicated to lead creative teams.
I graduated with a Master of Art Direction and Communication Strategy at ESAG Met de Penninghen in Paris in 2002 and started my career working for fashion magazines like ELLE, Glamour or Madame Figaro as both of my parents where working in the press world as Art directors. Design being in my family generations.
From the magazines I went to print and edition agencies for one year assisting a creative director to answer the agencies’s RFPs and that is where I learned the art of typography. I then make change and started to work as a designer for branding, packaging and communication strategy for luxury agency like Desdoigts & Associés or Dragon Rouge, here I learned that a brand should clearly define their identity and communication strategy if they don’t want their customer to define it themselves.
As I was young I went freelance and enjoyed myself a lot working mainly for the electronic scene creating identity or communication for records labels (supplement Facts, Bpitch, Bass Culture) or clubs (Rex Club, Djoon) travelling from Paris to Berlin or Barcelona in the Y2K but also for agencies like DDBA, TBWA as an Art Director.
In 2013, the endless party end as I became a mother and started to lead UX Design and Research team for e-commerce website or applications for Birchbox, Sarenza and Galeries Lafayette.
In 2015 I took a big leap and get my forever dream job being a creative director for Publicis, the n°1 advertising agency of France on the Champs Elysées flagship office with a private office and all, living the dream.
As a creative director my job was to lead a team dedicated to UX Design, Research, UI, Marketing, Social Media and digital Advertising but also to win clients working and presenting the agency pitch. Working Carrefour RFP I met the UK team of Publicis Sapient, we won it.
One of them as been recruited by Oracle to be part of an exciting project; building an “Experience team” for Oracle Cloud applications in EMEA, they were looking for one Director in Paris and called me.
The Experience Senior Director at Oracle was probably the most interesting I have done as it was absolutely undefined, my only job was to find solution to a variety of problem from infusing customer centricity to RFPS on HPA like Deustch Bahn, SNCF, BBVA or Inditex working with pre-sales leveraging design thinking workshops, redesigning the sales journey, implementing Redwood, Orcale’s new design system, creating physical experiences in order to capture the attention and sell SAAS but also PAAS and IASS in events like Leap in Riyadh or building a shared service UX team in Romania with scalable processes.
Going back to Barcelona in 2023 I am currently leading a team of +30 UX Researchers and Designer for a data analytics company that builds Saas applications. Being a Merge and acquisition company the job has 3 dimensions; building a team, a strategy and processes. The team has grown 410% in a year distributed in Europe, India, China and USA.
The strategy has been to first focus on designing the user journey to identify the overlapping functionalities of a wide portfolio fo +30 applications and turned them into one seamless end-to-end experience for our user but also to create and improve the understanding and adoption of UX design and research processes in the company. It is also about engineering processes for scalability and growth and finally to create a whole design system and implement it in order to be able to deliver faster any new features like AI searches for instance.
Those years of work empowers me to have a 360° vision of what a product, brand or service needs to come to fruition and make the difference. My work is about connecting business, strategy, technology and design via working inclusively. I am a storyteller and a designer that create rare and real experiences.
Still as much into music as I was 20 years ago, I am working closely on The Sound Society sound system Organisation in Barcelona along with a team of passionate friends. We aim to re-create the Paradise Garage Sound System putting back the sound at teh center of any club scene.
EXPERIENCE
2002 ESAG, Met De Penninghen - Master in Art Direction & communication strategy, Paris.
2002-2003 Graphic Designer for fashion magazines (ELLE, Madame Figaro, 20 ANS, BIBA), Paris.
2003-2004 Art Director / Creative Director Assistant, print & edition @Angie, Paris.
2004-2007 Branding Designer @Desoigts & Associés, branding and luxury packaging agency, Paris.
2007-2012 Freelance Creative Director @Leila Eisenmann, Paris - Barcelone - Berlin.
2013-2015 Creative Manager @Birchbox, Barcelona and @Sarenza, Paris.
2015-2017 Head of UX @Galeries Lafayette, Paris.
2017-2019 Creative Director @Publicis, Paris.
2019-2023 Senior Experience Director EMEA @Oracle, Paris.
2023... UX Design & Research Director @Clarivate Analytics, Barcelona.