VF Corporation / Timberland

Timberland needed a design system that could support its large-scale ecommerce ecosystem and maintain consistency across multiple regions and platforms. The challenge was to organize, streamline, and scale the design framework while preserving the brand’s heritage and visual strength.

One system. Three brands. Every e-commerce surface inside an entire VF Corp portfolio.

VF Corp owns Timberland, Vans, The North Face, and the rest of an outdoor/lifestyle apparel portfolio that sells through a dozen separate brand websites. Each one has its own identity, its own visual language, its own customer. None of them, left alone, were going to converge on a shared web experience without a system underneath them telling them how.

That's the work. Build the system every brand inherits from. Make it strict enough to standardize cart, account, search, product detail, navigation, the surfaces where consistency saves the company money and the customer time. Make it loose enough that Timberland still looks like Timberland and Vans still looks like Vans on top of it.

The broader cross-brand studio ran up to twelve designers depending on the sprint, split across Timberland, Vans, and The North Face. Therum held the Lead Art Director and product designer role on the Timberland workstream, starting alongside one other designer and then carrying it solo, owning every Timberland surface end to end.

We focused on establishing scalable structure through atomic design principles, defining consistent patterns for typography, buttons, navigation, and product displays. Each element was designed to improve usability and accelerate development without sacrificing brand identity.

Tier one was the cross-brand foundation, UX components: navigation, product carousels, filtering, cards, forms, the typescale and color tokens, all built once as the cohesive system the entire VF Corp web ecosystem inherits from. The Timberland theme then carried those same components into the brand's own language. Same parts, two finishes.

Drag the handle left to reveal the wireframe, right to reveal the Timberland theme. Five page templates.

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Same skeleton, different finish. On the left: the page template as wireframe, built from UX components, before any brand touches it. On the right: the same template themed for Timberland, black header, orange accent, brand typography, real photography. Five page templates, paired.

We built an enterprise-level design system that unified the brand’s digital interfaces. Deliverables included UI kits, component libraries, and layout templates adaptable for both desktop and mobile. The system streamlined updates and provided a single source of truth for global design and development teams.

The new system reduced visual inconsistencies, simplified maintenance, and improved collaboration across teams. Timberland’s ecommerce experience became more flexible and efficient, allowing for faster iteration and stronger brand coherence across all channels.

The cross-brand system was a team build. The Timberland implementation of it was ours.

Lead AD + product designer on Timberland. Production, design, and development oversight for the brand's full UI/UX e-commerce experience, both the EMEA and the NORA market sites. Started with one other designer, then ran it solo.

Owned the brand theming. Took the cross-brand UX components and page templates and applied Timberland's UI guidelines (type, color, photography, tone) to every shipped surface. The right side of every pair above is our hand on top of the team's foundation.

Held the line on a shared system. Kept the Timberland build aligned to the cross-brand system the wider studio (Timberland, Vans, The North Face) was building from, so the brand inherited the foundation without losing what made it Timberland.

Asset development for both markets. EMEA and NORA have different product mixes, different photography sets, different copy registers. Kept the system honest across both without duplicating the work.