Your playbook for custom gear
TLDR
Problem & Constraints
Ordering team apparel traditionally involves messy communication loops between coaches, parents, players, and dealers. Tasks like product selection, artwork application, design approval, and managing sizes or payments often require separate tools. This fragmentation leads to inconsistent branding, delayed deliveries, and frustrated users.
The goal was to design a single digital platform that unified these workflows while remaining intuitive for non-technical users. I faced technical and design constraints, including dynamic artwork rendering across product variants, responsive performance with large data sets, and aligning diverse user roles in a coherent experience. The challenge was balancing flexibility for dealers with accessibility for everyday users.
to walk away feeling like it was easy?
Process & Key decisions
Browse Products
Finding the right gear should feel like shopping, not filing a request form.
The product browsing experience was designed to work like a best-in-class ecommerce site, but with one key difference: everything responds to the team context. When a user switches their active team, the artwork, colors, and visible product catalog update to reflect what's relevant to them. No starting over, no extra steps.
Users can filter and sort through listings, apply their team's artwork to any product dynamically, and see color updates reflected in real time before anything goes into the cart. It's the kind of interaction that seems small until you've spent an hour clicking back and forth in a clunky configurator. We made sure it wasn't that.
Customize Artwork
The customizer is where the product really earns its keep.
Users can edit fonts, text, and colors, add or remove graphics, and customize the front, back, and sleeves of any product. Bruce steps in to handle the tedious parts automatically: player name and number placement follows league-standard rules without the user needing to know what those are. Customized designs can be shared with others for review or approval, and sending a finished creation straight to the cart takes one tap.
The whole experience was built to be fully functional on mobile. Not "mobile-friendly" in the sense that it technically loads on a phone. Actually usable. Because the reality is that a lot of the people customizing these products are doing it from a parking lot or stands.
Locker Room
Think of it as a team's home base inside the app.
Each team gets its own Locker Room: a persistent space where team identity lives. Coaches or managers can add the team name, mascot, school or organization, initials, colors, and graphics, and all of that information flows automatically into the customizer and ecommerce screens. When something changes for the team, it changes everywhere.
The Locker Room serves as the artwork management hub. Users can juggle multiple uploaded artwork files, switch between them seamlessly, and pull from a library of over 10,000 integrated templates when they need a starting point. It's a small concept with a big payoff: instead of rebuilding context every time someone opens the app, their team is already there waiting for them.
Design System & Components
The result is a UI that feels like a single cohesive product even though it's doing a lot of different things at once.
Building out the design system was a deliberate part of the process, not an afterthought. Components were designed to be flexible enough to work across the ecommerce, customizer, and management flows without losing visual coherence. Color tokens, typography scales, and interactive states were all documented so that decisions made at the component level stayed consistent whether a user was browsing products, managing their team, or reviewing an order.
Final Experience
Bruce brings together team management, artwork customization, product browsing, and order management.
The AI assistant handles the tedious parts. The Locker Room keeps everything grounded in team context. The customizer gives real creative control without requiring design experience. And the whole thing moves at the speed that coaches, parents, and dealers actually need.
The final experience is one that respects the user's time, which turns out to be the most important design decision we made.
