Zettle by PayPal (formerly iZettle) is a Swedish fintech company founded in 2010, offering a range of financial products such as a point-of-sales, partner SDK, card readers and mobile contactless payments tailored to small-to-medium businesses. Zettle was acquired by PayPal in 2018.

Zettle’s design team had been outgrowing our ways of working. As the design team and company grew, it was becoming increasingly harder to maintain design quality at scale. We did user research and found that designers and engineers were missing a common language, a single source of truth, coherent design and consistent handovers. We decided to start a design system and build a team around it.

Kicking off a design system and building a team was a process that meant getting buy-in from leadership and the rest of the organisation, defining the benefits of having a design system team working on it full time, as well as setting up processes and ways of working for the team. Once we got a green light, we started with the foundations of the design system; workshopping and setting design principles, breaking down our current design into components, setting up spacing, type and colour tokens. We also redesigned our icons with an icon designer.