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Waitrose
Design System for Direct Mail Service
We partnered with Waitrose’s direct marketing team to streamline their mail campaign production. The original system had grown organically to over 50 components, creating inconsistencies and inefficiencies across campaigns.
The system needed to work across Waitrose’s diverse product ranges—from the Waitrose Cellar and Florist to Pet and Garden. By consolidating similar patterns and identifying truly reusable elements, we reduced the framework to 12 core components that maintained flexibility across all categories.
The previous design system suffered from decision fatigue: an overwhelming number of options, with dozens of near-identical components covering the same job in slightly different ways. Rather than a clear toolkit, the team was faced with over 50 components to choose between for any given campaign — variations that had built up over time rather than been designed as a system — making it harder to know which one was “right” and easy for inconsistencies to creep in.
Results
From 50-plus overlapping components down to 12 core building blocks, the redesigned system gave the marketing team a clear, single source of truth instead of a guessing game. Campaigns across Cellar, Florist, Pet and Garden now draw from the same flexible toolkit rather than one-off variations, so new work stays consistent with the brand by default rather than by extra effort. The simplified system has halved design time and significantly sped up how quickly the team can turn campaigns around — turning what used to be a slow, component-hunting process into a fast, repeatable one.
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