Samantha Starmer
Manager, eCommerce Experience, REI, Recreational Equipment, Inc.

Over the last 12 years, Samantha Starmer has worked on a wide variety of experience and information architecture projects and strategy. She started her career in the early days of Amazon.com, enjoying a year long stint in Slough to launch Amazon.co.uk, and later developed experiences for Amazon’s checkout functionality and the third party selling platform. She also honed her start-up skills at SchemaLogic, and her business strategy skills while at Microsoft.

Samantha is currently a senior manager at REI, creating and leading teams for experience, interaction design, information architecture, and customer experience research and analytics. Her most recent focus has been evangelizing and creating holistic customer experiences across channels, time, and devices.

Samantha regularly teaches at the University of Washington’s Information School, where she received a Masters of Library and Information Science degree in 2005. She is active in the user experience and information architecture communities, and has served on the boards of the Information Architecture Institute and Content Management Professionals, and is currently on the Oversight Committee for the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.