A unified design system for Pentland Brands' CRM output; turning a manual, brand-by-brand email workflow across Berghaus, Ellesse, Kickers, Speedo and more into a single high-velocity production engine in Figma.
Pentland Brands runs a stable of global label: Berghaus, Ellesse, Kickers, Speedo, Canterbury, Endura and Mitre; each with its own voice, visual system, and audience. The CRM team needed high-volume, on-brand output across all of them, simultaneously, at retail speed.
Three problems collided: visual fragmentation: distinct brand identities had to hold across hundreds of unique CRM assets; efficiency at scale: retail deadlines like Black Friday and Christmas don't move; and technical constraints: every layout had to behave across every email client and dark-mode setting.
One library, seven brand voices. Components switch context without touching the underlying grid.
I built a design system in Figma to bridge creative performance and technical execution; the kind of foundation that lets a designer ship a fully-realised email in the same time it usually takes to brief one.
The component architecture is a master library built on nested components and variants. Responsive email layouts get constructed from the same underlying parts regardless of which brand they're serving, so structure stays consistent even when visuals diverge.
Accessibility and dark-mode compliance were non-negotiable, so they're baked into the library rather than bolted on. Colour tokens account for contrast thresholds; components have dark-mode variants from day one.
"Brief to high-fidelity in under two hours."
Revised V1 → V2 → V3 in the same working session.
The system transformed Pentland's CRM output from a manual, brand-by-brand process into a unified, high-velocity production engine. The marketing team can now execute complex campaigns: Black Friday, Christmas, flash sales, with significantly reduced lead times, without sacrificing design quality.
Visual consistency holds across the portfolio while each brand keeps its own identity, and the framework scales: onboarding a new brand or running a seasonal style update is now a matter of adding variants rather than rebuilding from scratch.