Wise adapted design system

Wise recently considered duplicating its design system for a second brand. Here’s the lesson in what went wrong.

A recently shared case study explains how Wise adapted its design system to support both its consumer product and Wise Platform, its proposition for banks and businesses. The new brand was visually different, but it was built on many of the same foundations.

Duplicating the entire design system would have created two large libraries to maintain. Instead, the team initially duplicated its shared colour library and expanded it to support both brands.

It sounded like a practical shortcut, but some components used by the editorial system were still connected to the original product tokens. When designers changed the brand theme, the surrounding page updated correctly while nested components, including buttons, retained the default Wise colours.

Basically, the system looked connected until one change revealed that it wasn’t.

Wise eventually brought its systems back together through a shared token structure covering brands, colour themes, interaction states, responsive typography, spacing, and accessibility scaling. The team also found that creating separate tokens for every possible combination could have produced more than 4,000 tokens. By separating shared foundations from genuine brand differences, it built something much leaner.

So there’s a useful lesson here for scaling product teams. Duplicating a design system can feel faster when a new demand appears. But it rarely removes complexity. It moves that complexity into future updates - into inconsistencies and more maintenance.

Because, more than a collection of reusable components, a good design system defines which decisions should remain consistent across the business, where variation is genuinely needed and how a change in one place should affect everything connected to it.

The more a product grows, the more important those invisible relationships become.