Northbeam Studio
Design system that scaled a homewares brand 5× on the same budget.
Twelve products, sixty on the way, no design system.
Northbeam launched two years ago with twelve SKUs designed by the founder and a friend. The product was a hit. Then they raised, hired a buyer, and committed to fifty new SKUs in eighteen months — across catalogue, packaging, social, and the website.
The founder was the bottleneck for every asset. Each new product launch took two weeks of design work. The pace was killing the launch calendar.
We started by auditing every existing asset and pulling out the patterns that worked: the photography crop ratios, the type pairings, the colour systems for product categories.
Then we built reusable templates in Figma + InDesign + Adobe Express: catalogue spread templates, social post templates by category, packaging dieline templates, lookbook templates. Each one designed so the in-house team could populate them without breaking the brand.
The retainer became a "fix anything that breaks" relationship — we audit new launches before they ship, refine templates, and keep the master library tight. The founder went back to running the business instead of designing every Instagram post.
Build the system. Then teach them to use it.
What the system enabled.
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60
SKUs designed
Up from 12, all using the new design system.
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4×
Catalogue throughput
Quarterly catalogue runs went from 1 to 4.
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−42%
Per-asset cost
Reusable templates cut design hours per asset by nearly half.
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100%
Team adoption
In-house team ships without designer involvement on most assets.
They built us a template library we still use every week. Hiring a part-time designer would have cost us five times as much.