Master Theme Design Library
Optimizing New Product Launches with an Evolving Design Library
The Digital team at Authentic manages multiple brands entirely in-house, such as Reebok and Champion, from merchandising to design to development. To ease the process of designing and developing a new site, I worked with developers and our product manager to create a single Master Theme from which new sites can be based from.
Timeline: July 2024 - Present (Ongoing)
Role: Lead UI/UX Designer
Tools: Figma, Shopify
OVERVIEW
With the Digital team now managing 8 brands end-to-end, it was crucial to optimize wherever possible.
Typically, site design would take approximately a month/two full sprint cycles to finalize prior to passing to development. The time for design and development would additionally cut into merchandising and content strategy needs, thereby increasing the overall time needed to prepare for a new site launch. With the team already managing multiple brands simultaneously, with more to come in the future, it was necessary to optimize.
SOLUTION
By standardizing common product features across our retail brands to create a single “Master Theme” to serve as a foundation, design and development time are significantly reduced.
With the majority of our brands centering around apparel and shoe and all of our brands centering around retail, most UX problems aren’t new and don’t require new solutions every time. The product team worked together to decide major elements that could be standardized, as well as document and provide back-end customizations within Shopify for variations of these elements, such as PDPs, PLPs, and navigation menus.
Above, Vince Camuto, Juicy Couture, DC Shoes, and Reebok, are all created using the Master Theme base. The PDP layouts largely look the same, with customizations for swatch styling, type styling, and image sizing according to each brand specifications, reducing the amount of brand-specific work.
THE PROCESS
This project began with the preparation for Vince Camuto’s launch mid-August, which would be the first site to utilize the new Master Theme, and the current brands would be onboarded afterwards, with new brands launching directly from Master Theme going forward.
Design-wise, I created Vince Camuto’s Figma file with the Master Theme in mind and then updated the current brands’ respective files with extensive component organization, type styles, and color styles.
Brands in the same sect of retail, like DC Shoes and Reebok, were able to be standardized even further, such as with PLP elements with swatches appearing upon hover. This was a necessary feature for shoe-forward brands as different colorways may be difficult to distinguish fully with a solid color swatch on PLPs.
In the backend settings for Shopify, all these customizable features were set up for the ease of merchandisers and designers to swap as needed between brands as well as set up entirely new sites. Below are customizations for a Bottom Edge Pill badge on a PLP, as well as the entire PLP page settings for swatch types and navigation.
Another high-impact feature is our Product Slider Tabs block, in which everything from the copy, linked collections, arrow types, and buttons are customizable. This block lives on homepages as "Shop By Category" type blocks or on PDPs as cross sells such as "You May Like," two areas where high amounts of interaction with products occur. Below are examples of Vince Camuto and Reebok.
IMPACT
With the additional time saved with the Master Theme, the team was able to spend more time to innovate on non-MVP features for brands, such as Vince Camuto’s customizable image category navigation on the PLP. Because of the shared parent Master Theme, these features can additionally be tweaked for use on other brand sites, current and future. With subsequent site launches, design and development have been completed in as fast as 2 weeks.
LEARNINGS
Without the Digital team being structured the way it is, giving me insight into the end-to-end process from merchandising to content strategy to design and development, it would have been much more difficult for me to understand how to improve in my role in a way that would impact the rest of the team. A key learning here for me is that rather than adding new processes or steps, it can be just as impactful to improve upon a current and familiar process.