One design system across Northwind's eleven storefronts
Eleven retail brands had eleven front-ends and one brand team. We gave them a shared token layer — a seasonal rebrand now ships in a day instead of a quarter.
Develi by the numbers
- products shipped
- 120+
- years in flight
- 9
- engineers & designers
- 40+
- client retention
- 98%
How the project went
The challenge
Eleven codebases, one brand team
Northwind had grown by acquisition, and each storefront arrived with its own stack, its own button and its own idea of what the brand's red was. A seasonal refresh meant eleven tickets, eleven QA passes and a fortnight of drift before anyone noticed the checkout still used last season's type scale.
The obvious answer — one component library — had already been tried and abandoned. Teams could not adopt a library that assumed a framework they were not on.
The approach
Ship the decisions, not the components
We built the system one layer lower. The shared artefact is a token set — colour, type, spacing, radius, motion — published as plain CSS custom properties, which every one of the eleven front-ends could consume without changing framework or build.
Components stayed local. What became central was the vocabulary they were built from, plus a visual-diff check in CI that fails a pull request when a storefront hard-codes a value the token layer already owns.
Results
A rebrand that fits in an afternoon
The spring refresh shipped across all eleven storefronts in a single day, from one pull request. The brand team now reviews a token diff rather than eleven staging environments, and the drift that used to be discovered in production is caught in CI.
Northwind project gallery
The Good words
“The previous attempt failed because it asked eleven teams to rewrite their front-ends first. This one asked them to change a stylesheet import. That is the whole difference.”
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