Case Study

Sherwin-Williams

Five brands. One system. Infinite stakeholders.

Brand

Sherwin-Williams

Role

ACD, Product Design

Brands

5 Consumer Brands

Scope

Multi-Brand Digital Transformation

The Project

The simultaneous digital relaunch of five consumer brand websites: Krylon, Cabot, Purdy, Thompson's Water Seal, and Minwax. Each brand had its own audience, its own visual identity, its own content strategy, and its own team with strong opinions about all three. One ACD responsible for the coherence of all of it.

Product discovery was broken across all five brands. Rich how-to content existed but was disconnected from the purchase journey. Mobile experiences lagged despite significant in-store mobile research behavior. And the digital presence, as it stood, was flattening the very brand differentiation Sherwin-Williams had spent decades building.

Sherwin-Williams multi-brand digital platform

Five Brands

Same system. Five different stories.

Each brand served a distinct audience with distinct content needs. The design system had to be consistent enough to maintain at scale and flexible enough that a Minwax user and a Krylon user never felt like they were on the same website.

01

Krylon

DIY & Crafters

Spray paint for makers, crafters, and weekend projects. Bold, energetic tone. Users who want inspiration as much as product information.

02

Cabot

Woodcare Enthusiasts

Stains and finishes for decks, fences, and wood surfaces. Craftsman aesthetic. A mix of serious DIY and professional applicators.

03

Purdy

Professional Painters

Premium brushes and application tools. Heavy on bulk ordering and professional specifications. Users who already know exactly what they want.

04

Thompson's Water Seal

Homeowners

Waterproofing sealants with strong seasonal and regional demand. Simple product line with high educational content needs — the 'why' matters as much as the 'what.'

05

Minwax

Wood Finishing

Interior wood stains and finishes. Guided product selection by wood type and desired finish. Users who need help deciding, not just browsing.

Infrastructure is a leadership decision.

Reflection on the engagement

It would have been faster in the short term to build five independent sites. Each brand team gets exactly what they want. No negotiation. No governance overhead. Ship and move on.

But that approach leaves Sherwin-Williams with five separate codebases, five separate design systems, five separate maintenance burdens — and no ability to onboard a sixth brand without rebuilding everything from scratch. The system approach required more upfront investment and more coordination overhead. It also positioned the business for sustainable growth rather than accumulating technical debt with every new brand or feature request.

The Problem

Four things broken across five brands.

Before touching design, we needed to understand what was actually failing. User research across all five brands surfaced a consistent set of problems — different in severity by brand, identical in kind.

01 — Product Discovery

  • Search and browse broken across all five brands
  • Users couldn't filter by project type, surface, or finish
  • The "right product for my project" journey didn't exist
  • Guided selection tools present on zero of five sites at project start

02 — Content Disconnection

  • Rich how-to content existed but lived separately from products
  • No bridge between inspiration/education and purchase
  • Minwax and Cabot had deep project guides that went nowhere
  • Thompson's seasonal content wasn't tied to purchase timing

03 — Mobile Experience

  • In-store mobile research behavior was significant and unserved
  • Users consulting product pages in hardware aisles got a desktop experience
  • Mobile usability lagged significantly despite that use case being documented
  • No in-store mode, no quick comparison, no spec at a glance

04 — Brand Flattening

  • Despite distinct brand identities, sites felt like one generic template
  • Krylon and Purdy had nearly identical homepage structures
  • Visual differentiation that existed offline wasn't translating digitally
  • Brand teams were frustrated — the investment in brand wasn't showing up online

The Scale

Five brands. One delivery.

5
consumer brands one shared design system

Five simultaneous brand launches. Different visual identities, different content strategies, different audiences. One underlying system flexible enough to serve them all distinctly — and scalable enough that a sixth brand could plug in without a rebuild.

Standardized: interaction patterns, navigation, product detail templates, accessibility, performance. Customized: typography, color, imagery, tone, feature prioritization. Those two lists never got mixed up.

The Process

Coordination at scale.

Five brand teams. Five sets of priorities. One cross-functional process that had to hold. The design process was as much about tradeoff framing as it was about design output.

Weekly Design Reviews

  • Cross-brand design reviews to maintain system coherence
  • Brand-specific reviews to protect identity decisions
  • Tradeoff framing: every "no" came with an alternative
  • Design system governance as a living document, not a one-time artifact

Stakeholder Management

  • Bi-weekly syncs with five brand stakeholder groups
  • Sprint-based delivery with visible progress for each team
  • Competing priorities surfaced early, resolved before they became blockers
  • Executive-level communication for system-level decisions

Technical Scalability

  • Shared component library maintained by a centralized team
  • Brand customization through tokens, not one-off overrides
  • Performance budgets applied system-wide, not brand-by-brand
  • Future acquisition onboarding built into the architecture from day one

Outcomes

Five brands. Better.

5

Brand sites launched
simultaneously

↑

Product discovery
across all brands

↑

Mobile usability
across all brands

Reflection

What made this project distinct from single-brand work was the constant negotiation between system-level thinking and brand-level advocacy. Both are legitimate perspectives. Neither can win completely.

The work that matters most on a project like this rarely shows up in a portfolio screenshot. It shows up in the governance model. In the decision rights document. In the stakeholder relationship that made five simultaneous launches possible without five simultaneous fires.

That's the work.

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