Design System | Product design
Scaling a Multi‑BrandDesign System at Carlsberg
Overview
Carlsberg Group's digital products were being built brand by brand and market by market, each team rebuilding the same dropdown, the same table, the same nav pattern from scratch. Malty was the fix: a single design system meant to give every team a shared language instead of duplicated work, so product delivery could scale without design and engineering re-solving the same problems every time.
Approach
I led the definition of Malty's structure, component logic and governance model, working closely with designers and developers across markets. Governance wasn't a doc, it was a flow: anyone could flag a bug or request a component, but urgent fixes could detach and ship locally instead of waiting on review. Anything broad enough to matter just had to come back into the system afterward.
Color starts as a flat set of tokens, system, support, default, none of it tied to any brand. Every theme just remaps three of those into primary, secondary and tertiary, its own values, same three slots. Global gets one set, Carlsberg gets another, Laos a third. Same structure, different market, no rebuild.
Thinking in an atomic system allowed us to isolate components and apply theming strategically, not evenly.
The button didn't need to know about the card, and the card didn't need to know about the theme. Its primary type just pointed straight at a token, theme.global.primary, theme.carlsberg.primary, theme.laos.primary, and resolved itself depending on which brand was loaded. That's the strategic part. One token changes, and only the pieces built to read it move. Everything else stays untouched.
Outcome
- Malty is live and in production, not a reference system sitting unused, teams are shipping real product on it.
- Carl's Shop runs on Malty across four markets, Denmark, Norway, Laos and UK, proving the system holds up across genuinely different market contexts, not just one flagship team.
- Skillable, a separate Carlsberg product, also adopted Malty, the clearest signal a design system can get: teams outside the one that built it chose to use it instead of building their own.
- Malty documents 42 components across forms, navigation, cards, overlays and more, with the majority already production-released and the rest openly tracked, not hidden, as known issues. It's a live, governed system, not a one-time deliverable.
