Context

The retailer was operating nine country sites that had drifted apart visually and functionally over years of local additions. Every market team was making its own design decisions, every release introduced new inconsistencies, and the brand experience was meaningfully different depending on which country a customer landed in. Accessibility, despite being a regulatory exposure across the EU, was being treated as a backlog item rather than a baseline.

What we led

• Built a unified design system and component library — a single UI kit that all nine country sites and the mobile app could draw from, with clear governance on what local markets could customise and what they couldn't.
• Designed for accessibility from the foundation: WCAG-aligned colour contrast, focus states, semantic structure, and keyboard navigation built into every component, not bolted on as a fix.
• Ran a structured usability and accessibility audit across the existing footprint, prioritising the fixes that would unblock the largest share of users — not just the loudest.
• Built the design-engineering bridge: components shipped with implementation specs so developers weren't translating Figma into guesses.

Outcome (15-week observation window post-launch)

• Design system in production across multiple country sites and the regional app — release cycles compressed, regression bugs down materially.
• Measurable accessibility improvement on Lighthouse and axe audits across the rolled-out surfaces.
• Component-level consistency that made every subsequent A/B test cleaner to run and easier to read.

Why this matters for founders

A design system is not a luxury for an in-house design team. It is the only realistic way to ship at speed across more than one market without quality collapsing. The retailers that move fastest in CEE are the ones that invested in this two years before they thought they needed it.