Alec Kunkel

Alec Kunkel is a design technologist (the role some companies call a design engineer or creative technologist): he designs products and campaigns, then builds them himself in production code. He is US Lead Design Technologist at Amazon’s Brand Innovation Lab, and was previously a Creative Technologist at McKinney.

Since 2018 I’ve been designing things and then building them myself: campaigns for big brands, tools for my team, and a lot of odd side projects.

Selected work

  • Protect Playtime: Nobody gets excited about flea and tick meds, so we sold them as a reason to go outside. Pop-up dog parks and catios shipped in an Amazon box, plus an AI pet finder that matches you with adoptable pets from a plain description.
  • Vertuo World Coffee Curator: An AI Brand Store that looks at your Prime Video history and picks a Nespresso Vertuo pod to match.
  • Kelce Clubhouse: An Amazon storefront for the New Heights podcast, with exclusive merch, episodes, and shopping in one place.
  • Smith: An internal AI assistant that drafts campaigns, builds prototypes, and helps brainstorm. Setup that used to take days now takes minutes.
  • The Mind Set: An Ad Council campaign where Olympic athletes tell their mental-health stories through personal objects, with support resources showing up wherever people already are on Amazon.
  • Beast Games: A Prime Video sweepstakes for Beast Games season two, built around the limited-edition Jack Link’s x MrBeast snacks.
  • Louder Than Cancer: A World Cancer Day campaign with Amazon Music. Scientists recorded the sound of cancer cells being destroyed, and we turned it into an anthem to drive donations.
  • Brand Launches on Amazon: The first Amazon storefronts for Nike, Coach, and Drake, each one built around the brand: an editorial store for Nike, a 3D store for Coach, and an animated warehouse for Drake’s Iceman era.
  • Brand Campaigns: Campaigns for OLLY, Tide, and MaryRuth’s that follow shoppers from first look to checkout, across Alexa, Prime Video, Fire TV, and the Brand Store.
  • Dog Review Interpreter: Point your phone at your dog while it eats, and generative AI (Amazon Bedrock and Rekognition) turns its reaction into an Amazon review.
  • ’Tis the Season of Sharing: A holiday Fire TV activation: send someone a Prime Video credit, and you get one too.
  • The Grilling Hall of Flavor: A shoppable Brand Store with four themed galleries full of recipes, quizzes, and hidden animations.
  • What’s Chester Watching?: Chester Cheetah picks the movie. A Fire TV, Alexa, and Brand Store program with rewarded ads and hands-off viewing for cheesy fingers.
  • Mani Try-On: A try-on in the Brand Store so people could see press-on nails on their own hands.
  • The Duster & Recipe Hub: A Fire TV and Brand Store hub for the Cheetos Duster, which turns Cheetos dust into something you cook with.
  • The Wind Down Club: A Brand Store and Fire TV hub that pairs Club Crisps with evening streaming, music, and two rewarded-ad experiences.
  • Consumer Electronics: Work for Samsung, Anker, Nebula, and Microsoft: virtual showrooms, launch pages, and tools that help people pick the right device.
  • Daily Art: In 2019 I made one thing every day for a year: an image, an animation, or a photo.
  • Let's House Durham: A campaign site with a simple pitch: if everyone in Durham chipped in a little, it would end homelessness in the city for a year.
  • The Gigapizza: A billion-pixel pizza with a secret code hidden somewhere in it. Little Caesars’ way of letting people unlock pretzel crust early.
  • Experiments & Prototypes: Everything else: finance games, ML art, AR filters, Twitter bots, a cardboard arcade cabinet, and every old portfolio.

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