lululemon, 2023 to 2025

Transforming the tools behind a global product operation.

lululemon’s internal teams and hundreds of outside vendors ran critical product work, like pricing raw materials, in spreadsheets. I led a multidisciplinary team that turned those workflows into digital tools, on a shared design system we built so eight product teams could modernize without stopping delivery.

My role: Product Design Lead, Supply Chain Operations and Tooling
Team: Three designers and nine engineers
Scope: Supply chain and vendor tools, built on Canvas, a shared design system

The Raw Materials Costing Tool home, the first tool to prove Canvas worked. Switch between the vendor and lululemon costing views.

The challenge

When I was brought in, lululemon’s internal tools existed only as Excel spreadsheets, and more than 20 teams were building tools that way. The company’s customer-facing design system, DAISY, was made for shopping, not dense, data-heavy business workflows.

We had one month to ship something teams could use. Modernizing couldn’t mean a freeze, and the tools had to work for everyone who depended on them, including hundreds of outside vendors. The business goal was to modernize a manual process and cut the time to complete a cost sheet from weeks to days.

What I led

Three decisions let the teams deliver fast without stopping their work. We prioritized three workflows, with costing first.

I led a multidisciplinary team of designers and engineers and coordinated adoption across eight product teams. Letting each team move on its own release schedule protected their delivery, and the first tool’s success won the budget and executive support to keep going.

Start from a proven library

Working with the development director, we built Canvas on PrimeNG, an open-source library, so teams could get off spreadsheets in weeks rather than months. The tradeoff: its structure limited some changes.

Let teams adopt now and align later

Each team moved on its own release schedule, so modernizing never meant a delivery freeze. Some screens were only reskinned to match at first, rather than rebuilt.

Choose clarity over brand

When lululemon rebranded six months in, we dropped brand red so errors stayed clear for the people doing the work. The tools drifted from the main brand, but they got clearer.

Comparison board: stock PrimeNG tabs, chart, message, and checkbox components above their lululemon-adapted versions. — Shared patterns let every team move fast: stock PrimeNG components, above, and their Canvas versions after the rebrand.

Designing complex workflows

The first proof point was Raw Material Costing, a suite of tools more than 500 vendors use to price raw materials with lululemon. Its success won the budget and executive support to transform more workflows. The people who make the product deserved the same quality bar as the people who buy it.

Cost sheets are dense, multi-step forms that vendors and lululemon’s costing teams work through together. Grouped fields, clear required states, autosave, and status tags keep that complexity manageable for people who use the tools every day.

The POC Tracker’s Filter purchase orders screen: filters on the left, and a table of purchase order lines with status, style, color, size, and quantity, six of them selected. — The POC Tracker, another tool built on Canvas: filter purchase orders, select lines, and request changes. Rebuilt with sample data.

Try it: a cost sheet that does the math

This is the same prototype as on kirsten.systems. Move through the tabs and change a detail, and the offered price recalculates as you type, so vendors can see how their price is built. Work saves as you go, so nobody halfway through eight tabs loses progress.

Designed primarily for desktop. Floor managers and other supplier roles can also view it on tablets and phones.

Rebuilt for this case study with example numbers. It isn’t lululemon’s production code or costing model.

Outcome

In six months, eight product teams moved onto a shared platform without a delivery freeze, each on its own release schedule, and more than 500 vendors use the costing tools built on it. The average time to complete a cost sheet dropped from six weeks to four days.

4 daysaverage to complete a cost sheet, down from six weeks

8product teams onboarded

500+vendors using the costing tools

6months to full migration