Every design system case study ends with a list of outcomes. Most of them are soft. This one is not, because HuskyX was born with a hard mandate attached: 50% cheaper, twice as fast. This article is about whether we hit it, and what the numbers looked like on the other side.

Where we started

Reckitt's web estate was roughly 700 websites scattered across AEM, Shopify, Umbraco, WordPress, and several proprietary stack variants. Every one of those sites carried its own build cost, its own maintenance burden, its own quality and accessibility gaps, and its own interpretation of the brand. There was no shared technical or design foundation. Building anything meant starting close to zero, every time, in every market.

That fragmentation was not just expensive. It made consistency structurally impossible. You cannot govern UX across 700 independently built sites. You can only chase it.

Where we ended

Today that estate runs as around 300 websites operating solely on HuskyX: one framework combining a Contentstack headless CMS and Gatsby with a fully tokenized, multi-brand design system built in Figma and Token Studio. The consolidation from 700 to 300 was not only a migration, it was a rationalization. Redundant, overlapping, and abandoned sites were retired, and what remained was rebuilt on a single foundation that guards consistency, UX, and UI across Reckitt's entire web setup by construction rather than by policing.

The four-tier migration model made this possible at every budget level. L1 gave smaller brands a simple, compliant digital presence. L2 added customizable layouts from predefined components. L3 layered on D2C functionality. L4 delivered fully custom websites still built on the same underlying system. No brand was priced out of the framework, and no brand landed outside it.

The founding targets, delivered

Pages on HuskyX are built at roughly 50% lower cost and twice the speed of the prior approaches. Those were the program's founding targets, set before a single component existed, and the system delivered against them at the scale of 200+ brands, including 11 Power Brands, in markets spanning almost the entire world.

Tokenization compounded the effect. With 58 components tokenized into nearly 2,500 tokens, parsed into production CSS with more than 90% automation, spinning up a fully custom-branded instance of the system takes hours instead of days. Time to market for a new brand site stopped being a project and became a process.

The outcomes that do not show up in a budget line

Some results matter beyond the cost sheet. Through sustained advocacy during this program, Reckitt adopted WCAG 2.2 AA as its global accessibility standard for all digital products, and years later it is still in force. Every custom layout built within brand guidelines is compliant by default, in LTR and RTL alike, because compliance was built into the foundations rather than checked at the end.

And the work reached beyond Reckitt. Through direct consultations, we influenced product development at Figma and Token Studio, contributing to capabilities for large-scale token systems that did not previously exist. A system built to solve one company's fragmentation ended up nudging the tools the whole industry uses.

What I take from it

The headline is 700 to 300, half the cost, twice the speed. But the real outcome is quieter: for the first time, Reckitt's web presence behaves like one deliberate system instead of hundreds of accidents. Consistency is no longer something we enforce. It is something the framework makes inevitable.