One design system, thirty retail brands
Shared components promise consistency and speed. They also quietly centralise risk. What it takes to run a single UI platform across brands that genuinely want to look different.
Every large retailer eventually proposes the same thing: one design system, used everywhere, maintained once. The economics are obvious on a slide. The hard part is that a design system is not a component library — it's an agreement about who gets to decide how things look, and that agreement is political long before it is technical.
Tokens are the treaty
The mistake is to start with components. Start with tokens — colour, type, spacing, radius — because tokens are where brand identity actually lives. If each brand can own its tokens while sharing the component logic, you get consistency of behaviour without forcing sameness of appearance.
- Global tokens — the primitives no brand overrides.
- Brand tokens — the layer each brand themes freely.
- Component tokens — internal wiring that maps the first two onto a button or a card.
When a brand team asks "can we make our buttons feel like us?", the answer should be yes, at the token layer, without forking a single component.
Centralised code, distributed trust
A shared platform centralises risk: one bad release reaches every storefront at once. That changes how you ship.
The bar for merging into a shared system is not "does it work for my brand" — it's "would I be comfortable if this shipped to all of them tonight."
In practice that means visual regression tests as a release gate, canary brands that adopt new versions first, and a deprecation policy measured in months, not days. The engineering is ordinary. The governance is the product.
Adoption is the only metric that counts
A design system with low adoption is just another library competing for attention. The number worth reporting to leadership isn't components shipped — it's the percentage of production surfaces actually rendering through the system. That figure tells you whether you've built something teams want to use, or something they've been told to use. The two decay very differently.