Closing the Gap Between a Rebrand and the Product
A brand refresh had shipped across marketing. The next step was bringing the full system behind it into digital product.
Agency Partner
Digitas
Design Lead
Greg Ward - Digital Experience
Adrienne Young - Brand Art Director
Key Contributors
HD Kim - Manager, User Experience
Ritsu Katsumata - Manager, Marketing Creative
Angela Hu - Lead UX Designer, Design Ops
Natalie Hawkins - Lead UX Designer, Community
Justin Duimstra - Lead UX Designer, Mobile App
Jay Pelc - Lead UX Designer, Business Management
Nathan Sharp - Lead UX Designer, Customer Management
Context
Amway had rebuilt its brand with Digitas, and it was live across print, marketing, and social. The digital team had adopted the new colors, and the next step was bringing in the layouts, components, and principles behind the refreshed brand. From inside a busy product team, a shared palette can look like full alignment, so the remaining gap was easy to miss.
Decision
Leadership brought Digitas in directly to set the digital standard, rather than asking the internal team to interpret a system it hadn't built. I was paired with the agency because I'd already worked with them on the brand side. Bringing an outside agency into product work was a meaningful change for the digital team, and it took time for everyone to settle into new ways of working together.
My job was making that arrangement work day to day, translating between the agency and two internal teams as they built trust in a shared process.
My Role
The bigger shift for me personally was learning when to step back. I was overseeing many of the resulting decisions, and I learned a lot from watching how Digitas ran a project like this and trusting them to lead the parts they understood best. It was a valuable lesson in trusting the experts you've brought in, and one I've carried into later work.
Outcome
We built a system spanning print, marketing, and UI on Frontify, one platform connecting brand and digital instead of two separate standards. I owned our relationship with the Frontify vendor and regularly met to discuss how to best use the platform for our needs. It was adopted into live product work while it was still being built, and new sub-brands have started from the same system since. I brought what I learned about trusting real expertise into my work on GM's design libraries afterward.
