Summary
Impact
Define the product
Build the product
Scale the practice
Design system
Outcomes
A reusable composable commerce foundation built from a decade of bespoke experience.
I helped turn a decade of bespoke commerce expertise into a sellable product: a reusable, microservices-based foundation that gave every client a strong starting point without locking them into a single stack. I defined what was reusable, set the standards, and validated each pattern with the teams who would build on it.
Every engagement started with a roughly two-month discovery that re-derived the same patterns from scratch. The pieces and connectors existed, but the frame didn't. And because the point of composable is that every brand composes a different stack, a fixed template wouldn't do: the foundation had to be reusable and adaptable at once. Anything could be built, so nothing was specified.
Productize the knowledge, not just the code. I made the design system and experience patterns the definition of the product: what every client started with, what could be customized, and what had to stay swappable so a brand could bring their own search, CMS, ERP, or ecommerce engine without the experience being rebuilt. Then I helped build the practice that let the rest of the company ship on it.
Founding design lead on the accelerator product team, and design owner for the design system. I defined product requirements alongside engineering, set the accessibility and responsive standards every pattern had to meet, owned the Figma design kit and experience patterns, and mentored the design squad so they could contribute back with every client build. I evolved the product from its early experiment through three years of iteration, expansion, and adoption.
Engineering knew what could be built. Design had to define what customers actually received. I led that work until we hired a head of product who took it over.
Patterns matured alongside client work. Too early created waste, too late blocked delivery.
Documentation came after enough patterns existed to document, and integrations followed demand: commercetools first, Elastic Path next, etc. We accepted real friction with delivery teams to hold that line.
Example storefront custom tech stack
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Most designers came from bespoke agency work, not commerce. New onboarding, shared language, and frameworks helped them contribute from their first project.
I ran design guilds to review new patterns from live client work, refine them, and fold them into the core, so the product improved as teams used it.
Internal teams and prospective clients couldn't adopt what they couldn't see. I created demos, one-pagers, and generated storefront content tailored by retail vertical. Those materials contributed to winning Kum & Go and ATD.
The product outlasted the team that built it. Work that began with a roughly two-month bespoke discovery now starts from a working storefront in days, measured at my departure.
Teilor was the first end-to-end build, and effectively the first time we dogfooded our own product after alpha: it saved 2 months, reached a second locale and major new features in 4 weeks, and leveraged 4 pre-integrations. Builds during my tenure also include ISSA, Kum & Go, Cymax, ATD, and OnLogic.
Orium cites 40+ client deployments on the foundation to date, and the accelerator has since expanded into B2B and agentic solutions. That's the real test of productization: the foundation keeps evolving without the original team.
