Publix’s journey to stand-alone microsites

Publix is a much-loved grocery chain in the south-east of the U.S., and its marketing team runs a lot of campaigns. Many of them need their own microsite, and each one has to launch quickly and carry the Publix brand with real craft.

Without a shared system, every new site was designed and built from scratch. That made launches slow, and it meant the brand was interpreted a little differently each time.

The question was: how do we give Publix a system that launches new sites quickly, keeps the brand consistent, and still leaves room for each campaign to feel like its own thing?

Two design teams had to work as one: Publix’s in-house team and ours at Fueled. Without a shared language, a shared quality bar and clear decision-making, the work could easily lose its purpose and never be adopted across the business.

The design itself had to stretch too. This wasn’t one microsite. It was a visual system flexible enough for very different campaigns, content types and brand partnerships, while staying true to the Publix brand.

I was the design lead on the project. That meant owning the design direction, managing the design team at Fueled, and making sure Publix’s in-house design team was part of the work rather than just signing it off.

I set the standard for what good looked like, decided where the team’s time went, and reviewed the work as it came together. I also owned the product scope, so we designed the right components in the right order, and kept design, engineering and the Publix pointing the same way.

I looped Publix’s design team in from the very start. We ran a series of workshops together to agree goals, success measures, roles and rituals across both teams.

The most useful part was writing down how we work together: who reviews, who approves, and what a finished design actually looks like. With both teams holding the same quality bar, I could lead one joined-up design effort instead of two teams working side by side.

Before designing anything new, the visual designer and I audited Publix’s existing microsites and pulled out every pattern that kept coming back.

I turned that into a product roadmap for the system, with components grouped into phase one, phase two and future. Each one had a clear purpose and set of rules. We also designed for the awkward marketing cases up front, like co-branded headers with more than one logo and delivery calls to action, so they wouldn’t derail the build later.

The visual design had to do two jobs at once. Every component needed to be a precise expression of the Publix brand, and it needed enough range to carry very different campaigns, from member perks to sports partnerships.

I shaped the team around that. Our visual designer focused on the core components and their look and feel, while I took on the complex pieces myself: components with lots of connected variants, and how editors would build pages with them. My component maps showed exactly how each block works and what content it needs, and I reviewed the visual work against the direction we’d agreed with Publix’s team.

We launched first with Club Publix, a smaller site that still used a wide range of components. It proved the approach: reuse, recombine and ship quickly, without compromising the Publix brand.

As more sites rolled out, I worked with Publix’s team to grow the system where it mattered most. We added recipe features, new marketing message styles and a sports team picker for the Tailgating site, all designed to sit naturally alongside the existing components.

A design system only works if people outside the design team can use it well. I led the documentation in Storybook, covering every component and variant: what it’s for, how it’s built, what content it needs, and how to use it well.

Marketing and content teams can now build new pages themselves and keep them true to the Publix brand, without needing a designer for every launch.

Scaling design is as much about people as it is about pixels. The system only worked because both teams agreed how good the work had to be, and who decides.

If I did it again, I’d do the same three things early: agree a shared way of working, write a product-level scope, and back it with clear design guidance. Get those right, and both the system and the partnership get stronger over time.

See it live (U.S. only): Tailgating, Club Publix, Black Community and Hello Publix.