Meet Vinney Dawson of UX Growth Lab

Today we’d like to introduce you to Vinney Dawson.

Hi Vinney, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I’m a South Bay native. In LA, that puts me in a rare category. Most people moved here chasing something. I grew up here.

Before digital design, I had a serious music career. I earned a Bachelor’s in Jazz Studies from Cal State Long Beach and a Master’s from USC’s Thornton School of Music, then spent years performing professionally: featured solo trumpeter at Disneyland, recording sessions at Capitol Records, Warner Bros., FOX Studios, and CBS, and live television on The Late Late Show with James Corden, Conan, and Jimmy Kimmel Live. I’ve shared stages with Gloria Estefan, Patti LaBelle, Cyndi Lauper, and José Feliciano, and played venues like the Walt Disney Concert Hall, MGM Grand Garden Arena, and Coachella.

Somewhere in that run, I got more interested in the digital side of things. How a website makes you feel. Why someone clicks one button and ignores another. What separates an experience that converts from one that just looks nice. That curiosity turned into a career.

In 2021 I joined Dermalogica as a UX Designer on their DTC e-commerce team, working on dermalogica.com. In 2024 I was promoted to Senior E-Commerce Experience Designer. That same year I launched UX Growth Lab. I kept seeing small and mid-sized businesses leave real money on the table because their websites weren’t built to actually sell. I knew how to fix that, so I started doing it. The agency focuses on Shopify e-commerce, conversion rate optimization, and SEO. Every client engagement gets the same approach I brought to every performance: figure out what the story actually is, then deliver it with precision.
The music, the years on stage, the design work. It connects in ways I didn’t plan but probably should have seen coming. Everything I do is about helping people experience something the way you want them to experience it.

“Allowing the culmination of our past experiences to coexist will spur innovation.” — Vinney Dawson

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Smooth is not the word I would use, but I also don’t think the hard parts were unique to me. They were just the cost of doing something real.

The biggest mental hurdle early on was the music transition. I had spent years building a serious performance career and I genuinely worried that pivoting into design and development would cost me that identity. It didn’t. I’m still very active in the trumpet community, I still take gigs on weekends, and performing for people is something I’ll never give up. But letting go of the idea that music had to be my full-time career in order to count as a career was something I had to work through.

Breaking into UX professionally was its own challenge. I completed a UX bootcamp through UCI and landed a full-time role at Dermalogica six months later. That sounds like a clean win, and it was, but it also taught me something important about myself. Getting hired at a respected brand that quickly told me I could compete in this space. It gave me a baseline of confidence that I carry into everything I do now, including running UX Growth Lab.

On the agency side, the ongoing challenge is scaling without sacrificing the quality of service. I’m not interested in selling clients a package full of things they don’t need. I take the time to understand each business and build something that actually fits them. That takes more work upfront, but it’s the right way to do it and clients feel the difference.

As for imposter syndrome, I think it’s pretty much universal in the digital space. My take on it is that if you’re genuinely hungry to learn and you’re staying on the cutting edge, you’re probably already ahead of most people. The anxiety usually just means you care enough to keep pushing.

“A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all. Solve the right problem.”
– Don Norman

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
UX Growth Lab is a digital growth agency built around one core idea: your website should be working as hard as you are. We redesign websites and add the features, content, and SEO your business needs to bring in more customers. Every service we offer — website redesign, SEO strategy, UX design, online features, content writing, and site speed optimization — is built around making your site faster, easier to use, and better at turning visitors into sales.

What sets us apart is the combination of things I bring to the table that you don’t usually find in the same person. I have a background in professional music performance, which sounds unrelated until you understand what that actually trains you to do. Musicians are obsessed with precision and detail in a way that translates directly into design and development. Every element on a page either earns its place or it doesn’t. I also come from the development side, so I understand how design decisions affect what actually gets built. And I’m doing this work every single day at the enterprise level, where I help run a Shopify storefront that generated over $32 million in revenue in 2024, with 23 consecutive months of double-digit growth. That experience directly informs how I approach every client engagement, regardless of their size.

I love e-commerce because the results are undeniable. Revenue either grows or it doesn’t. There’s no ambiguity. I also genuinely love working with local businesses because they are the heartbeat of their communities, and helping a small business generate more leads and more customers is one of the most rewarding things I do.

The clients I work with aren’t looking for a vendor. They’re looking for a partner who understands their business, builds something custom to their actual needs, and stays accountable to real results. That’s what UX Growth Lab is.

How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
The easiest way to get started is to visit uxgrowthlab.com and reach out directly. Whether you have a specific project in mind or you’re just not sure where your site is falling short, I’m happy to have a conversation and figure out if we’re a good fit. Every engagement starts with understanding your business first, not selling you a package.

If you’re an e-commerce brand on Shopify, a local business that needs more online visibility, or a company that knows their website isn’t performing the way it should, those are exactly the conversations I want to have.

For collaboration, I’m always open to connecting with other designers, developers, marketers, and agencies who share the same commitment to doing quality work. This industry is better when people build together instead of competing over everything.

And if you just want to follow along, I share insights on UX, conversion-focused design, and SEO through the UX Growth Lab newsletter and blog at uxgrowthlab.com. No fluff, no filler — just things that are actually useful.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.uxgrowthlab.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/uxgrowthlab
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ux-growth-lab