White Label Designs – All About Implementation, Design Systems, and New Technology

White label design has emerged as a popular strategy for many design and development agencies. White labeling allows agencies to build a single product that multiple companies can buy and rebrand.

It costs agencies a lot of time and resources to design and engineer tools, apps, and websites. So, building white label products is significantly more profitable than starting a new design every time.

Today, we will explore white label design and demonstrate how UX teams and developers can collaborate to build amazing white-label products with UXPin. Keen to jump in and start designing? Sign up for a 14-day free trial to start exploring UXPin today!

What is White Labeling

White labeling is the process of rebranding a single product or service for multiple companies to sell as their own. White labeling benefits the manufacturer and the reseller.

The manufacturer can focus on production and not worry about marketing and selling, while the reseller can outsource production and focus on selling products through its sales and distribution networks.

A good example is Amazon’s Basics range. Amazon buys white label products from multiple manufacturers and sells them under the Basics brand. Amazon doesn’t have the means (or desire) to produce products, but they have a massive global retail network to sell Amazon Basics.

What is White Label Design

White label design services follow a similar concept. A creative agency builds tools, apps, and websites (templates) that companies can purchase and rebrand.

For example, a WordPress theme is a white label product. An agency or solo designer/developer can build a WordPress theme and sell it on marketplaces like Themeforest. Any company can buy what is essentially a white-label website and rebrand it accordingly—changing fonts, colors, content, etc.

Pro tip: Themeforest is the biggest white label product marketplace in the world. It’s a fantastic place to explore white-label product niches and see how you can improve on Themeforest’s best sellers.

In theory, white label design sounds simple, but in practice, it’s very challenging.

Challenges of White Label Design

One of the biggest challenges of white label design is making a product that appeals to a broad demographic that any company can rebrand as their own.

Making something for everyone is a lot harder than designing a product for a specific demographic.

White Label Products Must be Re-brandable

Usually, a digital product focuses on the user. But a white label product must consider two users—the end-user and the company buying the white label product.

So, the primary objective is to make a white label product re-brandable. A company must have the ability to make edits to the design system rather than compromising the brand to fit the product.

Flexible Information Architecture

Another challenge for design teams is building a white label product that provides many page layouts and navigational possibilities while maintaining the flexibility to adapt to the brand’s requirements.

Brands should have the ability to choose which pages and user flows they need to build their final product.

Conversely, agencies must understand the final users, so they don’t provide too many redundant pages and features. Too much flexibility and customization can increase costs and possibly introduce unnecessary problems.

Accessibility

UX designers must also consider accessibility, so products comply with WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) standards.

UX teams will need to test their white-label design on a diverse range of participants to ensure the product is accessible.

The solution to these challenges (and the key to effective white-label design) is a flexible design system brands can easily customize with little or no code changes.

White Label Design System

A successful white label product features a flexible, well-structured design system that can adapt to any brand’s style guide. The goal is to facilitate significant changes with the slightest design system edits.

For example, changing the color palette with a few HEX code modifications.

Following atomic design principles can facilitate the flexibility required for a white label design system, starting with the smallest elements, which designers can build components for multiple page layout possibilities.

Instead of limiting designs to specific pages, designers use components to build features and layouts—providing customers with flexibility and customization through simple drag-and-drop changes.

We can break a white label design system into three parts:

• Elements – colors, typefaces, icons, grids, spacing, brand assets
• Components – buttons, tabs, page titles, form fields
• Modules – cards, forms, heroes, charts, tables, carousels

Elements

Elements are the smallest pieces of a design system, but they play a critical role in maintaining consistency and facilitating customization.

Designers must allow easy color and typeface customization while enforcing strict rules for icons, grids, borders, and spacing to achieve design consistency.

Components

Components are the parts of the design system users will interact with the most. So, here designers must focus on the user more than the brands.

Flexibility is still important at the component level, but the changes are more subtle. Brands might change borders, corner shapes, or swap content from left to right and vice versa to customize components.

Modules

With flexible components, designers can build the modules to create any page layout the customer requires. If designers applied the atomic design principles correctly, building pages should be a matter of drag-and-drop.

Every change and customization at the module level should be drag-and-drop. Designers can customize modules quickly by swapping, adding, or removing components.

Customizing a White Label Design System Workflow

If designed correctly, it should be quick to change a white label design system to meet a brand’s requirements. 

1. Designers start at the element level—changing colors and typography and uploading brand assets.
2. Next, designers modify components—adjusting component shapes (circle/rounded/square) and content configuration (for example, adding or removing an icon from a CTA button).
3. Designers use modules to build page layouts according to the customer’s requirements.

Instead of starting from scratch for every client, designers can use building blocks from a flexible design system to quickly design a white label product.

Agencies might build several white label design systems to accommodate various industries like restaurants, fitness, finance, and tech.

The Importance of Theme-Switching for White Label Design

Theme-switching is vital for a white label design system to accommodate different kinds of brand aesthetics. Most theme-switching changes happen at the element level and affect the secondary color palette.

Basic theme-switching requires two secondary color palettes:

• Light – light background with dark elements
• Dark – dark background with light elements

Designers must also use corresponding color scales to achieve accessibility and maintain consistency.

The problem is that most design tools don’t provide an easy solution for theme-switching. It isn’t easy to switch themes with a vector-based system. But, with a code-based design tool like UXPin, designers can theme-switch with a few clicks! 

Theme-Switching Made Easy With UXPin

With a bit of code preparation and utilizing the power of UXPin Merge, designers can use styled-components to inject Javascript into the design’s CSS to create editable theming capabilities.

UX designers can use UXPin’s theme switching for customizing other parts of the design, like quickly changing from circle to square-cornered buttons. It’s quick and easy!

Using UXPin Merge for White Label Design

Aside from theme-switching, UXPin Merge significantly improves white-label prototyping. Using code components, designers can build fully functioning prototypes fast!

Prototyping with UXPin Merge gives usability participants an accurate model with final product functionality, leading to high-quality testing and meaningful feedback.

These fully functioning prototypes can also help agencies to sell white label products to clients. Designers can impress clients by switching themes, use actual data (relevant to the brand), and make quick, on-the-fly changes during presentations.

Designers and engineers have two options for connecting code components with UXPin Merge:

• Git repository—currently only supports React components
• Storybook—supports React, Vue, Angular, Ember, and many more

By using code components, agencies can ship final products faster with UXPin—saving resources and increasing profits!

Final Thoughts

Hopefully, this article has given some insight into how you go about white labeling. A carefully planned design system is the foundation for a successful white label product. 

Like any design, UX designers must test white label products thoroughly to ensure the components and modules will work across multiple page layouts. Teams can use UXPin Merge theme-switching capability for testing both light and dark variations.

Getting Started with UXPin Merge

Here’s how easy it is to start building fully functioning high-fidelity white label prototypes with UXPin Merge.

1. Choose if you want to integrate UXPin with your Git code repository or Storybook.
2. Request access.
3. Integrate with Git repo or Storybook.
4. Drag and drop fully functional components.
5. Make usability changes, test, repeat.
6. Pass the prototype link to developers with all the ready component code they just need to copy into dev tools.

Get started with UXPin today and change how your design team builds, tests, and ships white label products. Increase productivity and profitability with the power of UXPin!