The problem
Trimble is a large construction and technology company. Geospatial satellites. Construction equipment. Sketchup. Dozens of brands acquired over the years, each carrying its own website, design language, and deployment process. Inside the company they joked about running a "black market of websites" because the portfolio had grown faster than the systems built to support it.
When Trimble acquired a brand, the website work would take months. Sometimes longer. Each new brand was a custom integration. Each rebuild was a one-off. The acquisition strategy was outpacing the digital execution by an order of magnitude.
What we led
Our founder led the design and rollout of a composable design system on Contentful, Netlify, and Gatsby with DSG (Deferred Static Generation) rehydration. The architectural approach was to create a handful of design flavors that shared a unified language. New acquired brands could pick a flavor, customize within the system's guardrails, and be live in days instead of months.
The cross-functional team spanned marketing, design, product, and engineering. Both agency and Trimble personnel. The leadership role was technical direction plus close work with the business stakeholders who needed to defend the strategy internally.
The hardest decision was where to draw the line on customization. Too rigid and acquired brands would feel erased. Too loose and the system would collapse back into the chaos it was supposed to fix. The composable approach made it possible to give brands genuine identity while still benefiting from shared infrastructure.
This work was eventually positioned to move toward commerce tools for the e-commerce layer. That implementation phase came after our scope.
What this shaped at Fidget Labs
Composable wins at portfolio scale in a way it does not win at single-site scale. If a company is running one website, a monolith might still be the right call. If they are running 50, composable is not optional. The economics flip the moment a company has more brands than they have engineers willing to maintain bespoke stacks for each one.
Fidget Labs sees this pattern everywhere. Mid-market companies with three or four product lines hit the same architecture cliff Trimble hit. The composable conversation should start the moment a company has more brands than the original system was scoped to handle.
Managing a growing portfolio of brands or product lines?
Fidget Labs designs and delivers composable systems built to scale with acquisition strategy. Architecture, design language, and rollout.
