Rebrand Without Breaking What Works
Adapting a brand system is straightforward. Protecting a high-performing sales engine while doing it is a different problem entirely.
the setup
When Direct Energy's US team launched a portfolio-wide rebrand, Canada was treated as an extension of what was already being built. The assumption was that a unified brand system meant a unified experience - same patterns, same components, same enrollment flow across all markets.
The problem was that Canada wasn't the same market.
Alberta operates under both a government-regulated energy market and a competitive free-market, selling natural gas and electricity where the US counterparts sell electricity only. Regulatory and disclosure requirements are stricter. And the Canadian enrollment experience - a grid-based plan selection flow - had been A/B tested extensively and consistently outperformed the card-based pattern the US team was standardizing around.
Canada was also brought into the conversation late. The rebrand was already in motion when we joined, which meant compressed timelines, limited contingency, and immediate pressure to align with decisions that had been made without Canadian input.
what i found
The clearest signal was already sitting in the data. The grid-based enrollment experience was converting at 5.8 to 7% consistently - a strong rate for a regulated utilities market where customers are navigating dual-fuel products, term commitments, and government disclosure requirements simultaneously. Switching to the card format the US team had standardized around wasn't a brand decision, it was a conversion risk.
Beyond the enrollment data, mapping the full scope of what Canada needed to translate revealed the scale of the gap between "adapting US templates" and what the work actually required. 600+ screens across Online Enrollment and Online Account Management, with legal and compliance sign-off required on every journey before dev handoff. The US templates were a starting point, not a solution.
what i did about it
The core decision was to treat the design system as something to extend rather than enforce. That meant building Canadian components that lived within the global brand framework without sacrificing the UX patterns that were proven to perform. It also meant having a direct conversation with the US design team about what regional flexibility needed to look like - not as a request for an exception, but as an argument for a better system.
I came to that conversation with data rather than opinion. A/B test results showing statistically significant decline across nearly every conversion metric when the card format was tested against the Canadian grid. Competitive evidence that our enrollment pattern was being adopted by direct competitors. A reframe of the consistency argument itself - acknowledging the legitimate goal of brand cohesion while being clear that consistency without regional flexibility wasn't serving either market.
The grid enrollment experience was preserved. A template-driven production approach was built to scale execution across 600+ screens. Legal and compliance review was baked into the sprint structure from the start rather than treated as a final gate.
[Process artifact: A/B test results or component library overview]
what it took
I led two contract designers - one onshore, one offshore - while staying two sprints ahead of development to prevent late-stage rework. The distributed team structure meant design check-ins had to be frequent enough to maintain visual alignment across designers working in different time zones without becoming a bottleneck.
The rebrand also predated Figma variables and tokens, which meant the component library was built on styles. Once variables became available, I migrated the system over - not because it was required, but because it was the right foundation for whatever came next. Every component was documented with usage guidelines, sizing, interaction states, and development parameters so the handoff was genuinely useful rather than just complete.
The pushback conversation with the US Senior UX Manager landed better than expected. He not only accepted the regional flexibility argument - he invited me into weekly peer review sessions with the US design team to help build that flexibility into the design system going forward. A disagreement became a standing collaboration.
what it became
Canada launched in parallel with the US rebrand despite joining the process late.
The enrollment experience was retained, and the data from a subsequent A/B test confirmed the decision. Running at 95% confidence across nearly 30,000 users over 13 days, the card-based format showed statistically significant decline across almost every metric that mattered - plan selection clicks down as much as 85.8%, address page visits down 19.8%, checkout visits down 12.2%. The grid held.
The conversion rate on the Canadian enrollment experience had been performing well enough that direct competitors adopted similar grid-based selection patterns - an external validation that the approach was right, not just defensible.
The work also influenced how the broader design system approached regional variation. What started as a Canada-specific accommodation became part of a larger conversation about how a global brand system serves markets that don't behave identically.
