Multi-Brand Design Systems: Tokens, Themes, and Variants

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, companies are extending their products across multiple brands, platforms, and user bases. As design requirements scale alongside these growing ecosystems, design systems have emerged as essential tools to maintain consistency, efficiency, and user experience. But what happens when one design system is expected to support multiple brands? Enter the concept of multi-brand design systems, a strategic approach that balances customization with cohesion using a set of core principles—tokens, themes, and variants.

Design systems are not just style guides or UI component libraries. They are comprehensive ecosystems of standards and resources that enforce consistency and improve scalability for development and design teams. When applied to a multi-brand context, these systems need to accommodate different visual languages without duplicating efforts—making a modular, tokenized foundation incredibly valuable.

Understanding Design Tokens: The Building Blocks

Design tokens are the smallest, measurable unit of a design system. They abstract design properties—such as colors, typography, spacing, and elevations—into reusable variables. These tokens are platform-agnostic, allowing brand attributes and values to be standardized and shared across different environments.

• Color tokens: Primary, secondary, and background colors defined at a brand level like color-brand-primary.
• Spacing tokens: Margin and padding values designated as spacing-xs, spacing-md, etc.
• Typography tokens: Font sizes, weights, and line heights abstracted into font-size-l or line-height-base.

In a multi-brand system, you can define a base layer of global tokens that govern shared values. These tokens are then customized at the brand level by overriding only the necessary variables, maintaining the architecture but changing the flavor.

This approach not only streamlines maintenance but also allows for coherent brand expression. A banking app can retain its structure while visually distinguishing its consumer-facing and enterprise-facing products with color, typography, and branding that feel native to each user group.

Using Themes to Layer Brand-Specific Identity

While tokens are abstract variables, themes are collections of token values applied to a UI to give it a specific look and feel. A theme pulls together brand elements like color schemes, typefaces, spacing, and icon styles to create a unified visual identity.

For multi-brand design systems, themes are the key to diversification within a consistent framework. Think of them as skin overlays that maintain the skeleton (structure and behavior) of the design while allowing for aesthetic differences.

Consider a product suite that spans three brands: Brand A, Brand B, and Brand C. All brands use the same underlying component architecture—cards, buttons, forms—but each brand has a distinct theme:

• Brand A: Uses a high-contrast palette, bold headers, and rounded borders.
• Brand B: Chooses muted tones, serif fonts, and square edges.
• Brand C: Incorporates vibrant colors, monospace typography, and unique iconography.

Each theme can be built on top of a shared core token set and toggled dynamically based on the end-user or product context. This makes it possible to scale a product line quickly while preserving brand authenticity.

Component Variants: Customization Without Duplication

If tokens are variables and themes are layers, then variants are manifestations. They allow for controlled modifications of a component without rewriting it or breaking uniformity.

Variants are especially useful in multi-brand systems where different brands require subtle adjustments on the same component type. For example, a “button” component may have multiple variants such as:

• Primary/Secondary: Changes visual emphasis but remains semantically the same.
• Compact/Large: Adjusts padding and font size for different screen densities or user needs.
• Brand-specific: Applies a theme-specific visual customization without breaking component behavior.

This modularity makes components incredibly flexible and future-proof while adhering to design and accessibility guidelines. Developers benefit from reusable code and design teams save time without sacrificing visual cohesion.

The Interplay Between Tokens, Themes, and Variants

To fully unlock the potential of a multi-brand design system, it’s crucial to understand how tokens, themes, and variants interact with one another.

Tokens are your source of truth—defining raw values like #0044cc or 16px. Themes reference and group these tokens in meaningful configurations that align with branding. Variants take this themed logic and apply it to real, functional components, allowing teams to switch, scale, and experiment without rewriting core logic.

This three-tier architecture encourages:

• Separation of concerns: Designers focus on visual design, developers focus on interaction logic.
• Consistency across brands: Shared components mean fewer bugs and scalability issues.
• Rapid iteration: Swapping a theme or updating a token affects all components uniformly.

Technical Implementation and Tools

Creating a robust multi-brand design system requires both strategic planning and the right tools. Technologies like CSS-in-JS (e.g., styled-components), Sass, and design-token management systems such as Style Dictionary or Tokens Studio can help manage the complexity seamlessly.

Here’s a simplified flow of how a typical multi-brand setup might work:

1. Create global tokens: base values for color, font, spacing, etc.
2. Define brand-specific overrides for these tokens.
3. Group token sets into themes for each brand.
4. Create universal components that reference these tokens.
5. Introduce variants for finer UI adjustments.
6. Dynamically apply themes based on user, brand, or app context.

Challenges and Considerations

As elegant as multi-brand design systems sound, they don’t come without challenges:

• Governance: Who manages token updates across multiple teams?
• Complexity: Too many themes or variants can become hard to maintain.
• Tooling limitations: Some frameworks lack built-in support for dynamic theming.

Solving these challenges requires collaboration, documentation, and a mindset that prioritizes scale, automation, and a shared vision across design and development teams.

The Real-World Impact

Leading organizations like Adobe, IBM, and Shopify have implemented multi-brand systems to support product lines across different markets and business segments. For example, Adobe’s Spectrum design system ensures cohesion between creative tools like Photoshop and business tools like Adobe Analytics, even though their audiences and visual needs differ greatly.

When done right, a multi-brand design system isn’t just a convenience—it’s a strategic advantage. It empowers teams to work faster, unify development and design across products, and provide tailored experiences without starting from scratch.

Conclusion

As businesses scale and diversify, the demand for adaptable, intelligent design systems will only increase. Tokens offer flexibility at the foundational level, themes bring emotional and brand-specific aesthetics, and variants fine-tune components to meet diverse user needs.

By embracing these pillars, organizations can build multi-brand design systems that are not only technically robust but also creatively liberating—balancing consistency with the freedom to express each brand’s voice in a unique and impactful way.