Designing Scalable Workflows for Apparel Dealers

I joined Chipply's product design team in September 2025. As one of two designers, I've had the chance to take significant ownership—leading projects from discovery to handoff and shaping core parts of the platform.

Bringing production management into our platform marked a key milestone toward realizing our end-to-end vision. Many of our users with in-house print shops still rely on paper-based workflows—passing printed work orders between stations and transferring digital files via hard drives. While our platform already streamlines purchasing through vendors like SanMar, it previously stopped short of managing what happens next. Introducing production management not only closes that gap but also represents a major opportunity: positioning our platform as the true one-stop shop for apparel decorators and unlocking new revenue potential beyond eCommerce store commissions. Securing buy-in for this first end-to-end feature was therefore critical to our broader strategy.

From the start, we approached this feature with a systems-thinking mindset—considering not just the immediate workflows but how production would connect across the entire lifecycle of an order. We used the project as a catalyst for broader stakeholder conversations around shared concepts like statuses, production files, and traceability across the platform. To accommodate the wide range of production styles, from small shops to large operations, we designed a flexible architecture that lets users pull in work orders by process, by store, or by combining multiple processes into custom production batches. Because of this upfront alignment and architectural groundwork, production management now integrates seamlessly with related features like purchasing—serving as the foundation for our end-to-end product vision.

As our platform expanded beyond store setup into more complex workflows, it became clear that our existing navigation couldn’t keep up. The old structure reflected early product priorities but struggled to support new features and user pathways. A redesign was essential to enable the platform’s continued growth. Our design team led the initiative, balancing the current product with the future vision, gaining stakeholder buy-in, and collaborating across teams to redefine how users move through the system.

Redesigning the navigation required deep systems thinking. It was essential to balance the familiarity of existing user habits with a forward-looking product vision. We mapped flows, defined page hierarchies, and collaborated closely with stakeholders to create a navigation model that can scale as the platform evolves. Key areas of impact included differentiating between global and store views, and establishing groupings designed to grow over time. The result is a cleaner, more intuitive structure that streamlines current workflows and lays a strong foundation for what's next.

When I first joined, there wasn’t an established design system—only a handful of Figma components. I led the effort to build a cohesive, cross-platform component library and continue to maintain it through ongoing documentation and updates.

It has become a foundation for our entire engineering team, helping us build faster, stay consistent, and elevate our visual language across the platform.

Chipply is a complex platform, with deeply interconnected workflows tracing down to a single item ordered by a customer. Whenever I design a new feature, my first step is mapping the upstream, downstream, and intersecting flows. For example, a change in Purchasing will almost always ripple into Production Management, even if it initially seems unrelated. This mindset has been essential to helping us ship quickly without creating “merge conflicts” in the logic and user experience.

I apply the same systems-level thinking to our design system. Across engineering and design, we’ve made a concerted effort to prioritize and evolve the new system. Despite early growing pains, it's already proving its value dividends as we build more complex features.