Fourteen brands. One token system.

Fourteen appliance brands shipping into thirty markets, each on its own UI stack, drifting further apart every release.

The engagement spanned design system and design ops, working across the central team and the brand teams, from token architecture to the operating model that keeps it moving.

Every brand built its own UI. Consistency was bought back by hand: meetings, reviews, reconciliation. A coordination tax, paid on every release.

The tax compounded. Each release meant another round of cross-brand alignment; each new market, another set of surfaces to keep in line. The portfolio was drifting apart faster than coordination could pull it back.

One token layer, read by every brand. Each brand's look lives in the tokens, so brand identity became a token decision, not another copy of the code.

Underneath the tokens sit shared component foundations. Each brand ships its own expression on common behaviour. The look changes per brand; the components underneath do not.

Architecture alone doesn't hold a portfolio together, the operating model does. Governance drew clear lines between what the central team owns and what brand teams decide, so both could ship in parallel instead of queueing behind each other.

A contribution flow let brand teams propose changes back into the shared layer, and adoption moved brand by brand, each team onboarding when its roadmap allowed, none forced into a big-bang cutover.

What teams design and what ships now match, portfolio-wide. It's the same architecture we install today. This case is the blueprint.