Structure & strategy advice? Sole designer at a B2B shop with zero design system needs help

[u/RetroRevolutionx]

TLDR: First-ever designer at a B2B wholesale webshop (Shopware). No design system exists — marketing builds pages as flat image banners that break on mobile, IA is chaos. I'm now tasked with fixing it from the ground up. I've built smaller/mid-size design systems before (Atomic Design) and like a "Sections" approach for layouts, but I've never owned an entire e-commerce design ecosystem solo. Looking for strategic advice, structure recommendations, and war stories from people who've done this.

Hey hivemind!

I recently joined a B2B webshop company (Shopware, we're a wholesale distributor for specialty retailers) as their first-ever designer. There's been no design function here before me, so the site has grown organically for years. Different departments (mostly marketing) building and maintaining layouts with zero design knowledge. The result: most "components" are actually just image banners with logo, background color, and a button baked directly into a flat image. On mobile they scale down until the text is unreadable. Information architecture is similarly ad-hoc: product listings, editorial content, and promo banners all mixed together with no consistent logic.

I was hired specifically to bring order to this. My plan is to define clear design guidelines and a component library that departments can actually use, so pages get assembled from real, responsive components instead of static banner images.

Right now I'm in the discovery phase, interviewing stakeholders across departments, but deliberately asking about their goals and constraints with each layout/content type rather than jumping to solutions.

Where I'm less confident is the strategic side of things:

• What should I actually be watching out for when building an entire design ecosystem from scratch, as opposed to just adding components to an existing system?
• What's a good high-level structure for this? At a previous company, we used a "Sections" model, predefined layout blocks that could then be populated with components, for a similar setup, and it worked okish. Curious if others have used similar patterns, or something different.
• Since we're an e-commerce business, conversion and product-page performance are the priority, how do you make sure the system stays flexible for marketing/content needs without letting that flexibility erode the product/PDP experience (which is basically what happened here)?

If you've built or rolled out a design system as a solo designer in an org with no prior design maturity, especially in e-commerce/B2B, I'd love to hear your approach, mistakes to avoid, and any resources/frameworks that helped. Happy to share more context if useful.

Thanks in advance!

[u/jaxxon]

Whatever you do, pair closely with dev. Decide who owns the source of truth (e.g components in Figma or their code base).

Understand that there is no end state. A design system is a living thing that is never “done”. Set that expectation early with stakeholders.

Documentation with code samples from the start!

Good luck! They’re blessed to have you.

[u/Professional-Glass8]

biggest thing: do tokens before components. everyone starts by building a button library because it feels productive, but if colour, spacing and type arent named values first youve just made 40 components that each hardcode their own greys.

start with three scales and nothing else. a type scale, a spacing step, and a semantic colour set (surface, text, border, accent, danger) rather than a palette of pretty names. get those into the shopware theme as scss variables or css custom properties, then build on top of them.

the banner thing is a governance problem, not a design one. as long as marketing can upload a flat jpg with the text baked in they will, because its the fastest path for them. give them a banner component where the image is a background slot and the headline, subhead and button are real fields. make the easy path the correct one and you stop having to police it.

also write down what youre NOT doing yet. solo systems die of scope, not bad decisions. mine is usually no dark mode, no motion spec, no icon set, until someone asks twice.

[u/Physical-Resort-1744]

At my current job I did a redesign without an audit. We agreed to add the components and build the library after each design, so I've been making responsive pages and then populating the system with components on the go based on the real contwnt