When Karri Saarinen was leading design at Airbnb, the same components existed across the product in many slightly different versions, and nobody could say which one was correct. Rather than tidy them up, he and his team wrote down a single language for the interface and rebuilt from it. It became the Airbnb Design Language System, and he went on to co-found Linear.
Get up to 70% of your front-end resource back
What came out of it did not make the product prettier. It made it cheaper to change. Designers stopped redrawing what already existed, and engineers stopped rebuilding it underneath them.
Meanwhile, most teams keep paying for the same buttons, forms and layouts again and again. Once per feature, once per project, once per new hire who could not find the existing one.
The difference? One team wrote the vocabulary down. Everyone else keeps deriving it from scratch.
A design system should eliminate 70% of redundant front-end work
What it costs to go without one
Startups
$24k monthly loss
Startups burn around $24,000 a month for four to six months building design systems that then fail.
Startups
Enterprise
$0.5M annual loss
With development teams of eight to twelve people on $90,000 and above, inefficient front-end work costs over $500,000 a year per team.
Enterprise
Small teams get overwhelmed, components end up without accessibility, and a rebrand destroys what was built.
The problem is not design systems
Think of a design system as the product’s blueprint. A central library of reusable components, styles and patterns that every designer and developer works from. Instead of recreating buttons, forms and layouts for each new feature, teams pull from pre-built, tested pieces. Consistency comes for free, and development time drops.
So the problem is not design systems. It is how they get built. Most startups do not have the expertise to create something genuinely scalable and flexible, and end up with a constrained MUI copy that does not fit their brand.
Companies that get this right do not build from scratch. They take a proven, research-backed system with continuous support behind it. DoorDash runs junior developers guided by system architects, which scales without paying senior developer rates for routine work. Revolut cut front-end workload by half with the same approach.
What a system needs to include
Pre-built React and TypeScript components
Ready-to-use Figma libraries
Full accessibility compliance
Brand-customised rather than generic
Design and engineering teams available as a service
Junior developers become productive contributors immediately. Instead of expensive trial and error you get the whole ecosystem: a branded system, custom documentation, scalable processes and ongoing education. Your team integrates with it while we carry the complexity.
What it returns
Design
+38%
Design efficiency improvement
Startups
Development
+31%
Development productivity gain
Enterprise
The arithmetic is not complicated. Teams working from a proper design system move considerably faster than teams rebuilding components repeatedly. The question is only whether you want to keep funding the same work across every project.
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