Enterprise Design System
The Columbia Sportswear Company design system is the culmination of years of striving to unify all the company brands and regions into a single extensible language. The sheer amount of exploration—and orchestration—to rollout the system in conjunction with the migration of multiple platforms required extreme collaboration with many, many partner teams. Working closely and iteratively across the org, we created and documented a design system built to scale the business into the org’s digital future.
The Challenge
Create a unifying digital design system that supports multiple brands and regions and enables consistency at scale.
Laying The Foundation
The truth is our design system began during our last replatforming with lofty goals to maintain a single stable code base in the background and a unique look-and-feel for each brand on the front-end. But the scaffolding that held it up was too malleable and confusing and over time it became unwieldy. In the years since, we’ve set our site on more unique experiences for each unique brand and other digital offering have appeared on the roadmap. We took the time to lay the foundation for a system that would work and grow with all brands into the future—no matter the ad campaign, the platform or the region.
Free people up to build really cool stuff with a common language for better design & developer communication and faster speed-to-market to meet the demands of a retail engine.
The System
A flexible component library built on a layer of tokens that allow for a highly customizable front-end experience with a low development lift. The core atomic components allow for changes to happen at the smallest level and adjust the component display and interaction.
The Future
The Columbia Sportswear Company design system enables brand alignment for Columbia as well as Sorel and Mountain Hardwear, while allowing for pivots in changing priorities. It is built to evolve—components can be rapidly created in alignment with the design system so that the brand values are recognized and a more cohesive user experience is presented. The design system has helped pave the way for the entire digital ecosystem while delivering a premium experience to the user.