Brand Templates

What started as a small redesign for a single brand site—Depend Australia—quickly turned into something much bigger. Halfway through the project, leadership decided this work would become the foundation for all future consumer-facing websites at Kimberly-Clark.

That meant a design originally scoped for a small, content-light site suddenly had to scale to massive brands like Huggies, with hundreds of articles, product pages, and complex regional needs. The challenge wasn’t just redesigning a site—it was creating a system flexible enough to work everywhere, without losing consistency.

The challenge

The original goal was simple: redesign the Depend Australia site. It was relatively small, with limited content and straightforward structure. But once leadership saw the direction of the work, they made a call to use it as the baseline for every consumer brand site going forward.

That decision changed everything. Now the design had to support:

The hardest part was that there was no centralized documentation or design standard to start from. Every region and brand had evolved on its own, with different layouts, CMS needs, and edge cases. We had to reverse-engineer consistency from chaos.

The solution

We started with a full audit of consumer brand websites across regions. We cataloged layout patterns, CMS requirements, localization needs, and all the weird edge cases that had grown over time. From that, we designed a modular system of web templates that could handle very different types of content while still feeling like one cohesive family of sites.

Each template was built to be flexible: responsive layouts, swappable content blocks, and customizable styling that allowed brands to keep their identity without breaking structure. The goal was simple—standardize what matters, and make everything else configurable.

I built the initial template using the Depend Australia site as the base. Once that was solid, the system expanded through our design system. Multi-brand support was handled largely through variable modes—by switching the brand mode, the same templates could instantly adapt to different brand styles. After that, the main work became helping brands plug in their content rather than redesigning layouts from scratch.

I also helped lead the frontend implementation and documentation so developers and content teams across regions could confidently use the templates, even for large, complex sites.

The result

What began as a single-site redesign became the baseline for all future consumer brand websites at Kimberly-Clark. The system now supports everything from small regional pages to massive global brands.

The biggest wins were speed and clarity. New sites launched faster. Teams made fewer design decisions because the system already answered most of them. Brands could focus on content and storytelling instead of layout debates.

Most importantly, the company finally had a shared foundation—one that balanced global consistency with local and brand-specific flexibility. Instead of reinventing the wheel for every site, teams now build on a system designed to scale.

This project showed me how quickly a small design decision can turn into a platform-level responsibility—and how important it is to design for growth, even when you don’t know yet how big something is going to become.