Best
Wishes
AR

A Simple Gesture,
Scaled

Best Wishes began with the belief that a handmade card — the act of sitting down, picking up a pen, and saying something true to a stranger — is one of the most quietly powerful things a person can do. The challenge was turning that belief into an organization.

As founder, I built the operational framework that allowed Best Wishes to grow from a local initiative to a four-branch nonprofit across the United States, coordinating over 1,000 volunteers through a system that honored both the intimacy of the gesture and the need for operational scale.

The augmented reality card-making model was developed to solve a specific access problem: how do you let someone who can't be physically present — a student, a remote volunteer, someone in a different time zone — still make something that feels genuinely handmade?

Handmade,
Virtually

The augmented reality card-making model was built to preserve the essential quality of a Best Wishes card — that someone paused, made something, and sent it with care — while removing the barriers of physical location and material access.

Volunteers use the AR environment to design, personalize, and compose cards in a virtual space. The output is then formatted for physical printing and delivery, or sent as a digital format that maintains the handcrafted aesthetic. The experience is designed to feel like making, not just clicking.

Building Something
That Lasts

Founding Best Wishes required thinking like a product designer and an operations leader simultaneously. The volunteer coordination system, the chapter expansion framework, and the quality standards that ensure every card meets the organization's core promise — that was all infrastructure design.

The lessons from building Best Wishes directly inform how I approach product work: the most important design decisions are the ones that determine whether something can grow without losing what made it meaningful in the first place.