Multi-Brand Design System
Scaling a multi-brand, code-synced design system without a dedicated team.
A system nobody owned
When I took on leading Showcar, AutoScout24's design system, it had no owner. It was a loose collection of components, and how they were implemented in the product was patchy.
A new brand acquisition meant the company needed a system that worked across the company, and fast. I led the project alongside my product work, bringing in the wider UX team to contribute next to my own hands-on work.
Design drift, and a second brand
Without an owner or a shared source of truth, every team solved the same problems in its own way. Signed-off designs would appear differently in production.
Additionally, a new requirement appeared: our design system had to support the newly acquired AutoTrader.ca in Canada, a company with a different brand. The acquisition only made sense if both businesses ran on one platform. To support that, the design system had to become far more complete, and it had to carry more than one brand.
Building it with people, not for them
- A way to contribute. I set up a contribution process: a dedicated Slack channel and a bi-monthly UI Guild call where designers could propose new components or changes to existing ones.
- Components with the UX team. I worked with the UX team to design the components and write their documentation, so every addition shipped with guidance on how to use it.
- Engineers who cared. I looked for the engineers who were passionate about the system and wanted to build it together, and made them part of the core group.
- Tokens that match one to one. I created a token system that syncs Figma variables with the development tokens, so design and code always hold the same values. Switching brand became a change of token set rather than a redesign.
One system, many brands
Showcar is now complete enough to build on. It underpins search, the private seller flow and the key dealer interfaces, and it supports multiple brands through its tokens. One system now carries 6 distinct brands, the foundation that running these businesses on one platform depended on.
Because design and code share the same tokens, what designers specify is what engineers build.
AI agents are becoming a customer for the design system.
As AI transforms our workflow, the design system sits at the heart of that transformation. I'm now working on integrating it with Figma Make and Codex, and making the documentation machine-readable, so agents can build to the same standard as the team.