About Loom
We have run a system of systems. Loom brings that control to every team.
Loom is a product company that takes design systems to the next level. It grew out of a global design system that had to serve very different people, in an organisation where nobody could be told to use it.
A product company
Loom helps design teams see, shape, govern and run their design system, with people in charge of every decision. We start with a free health check, then convert and maintain systems with our clients as curated consultancy delivered with Loom, and the platform does the routine work in between.
We are a small company based in Singapore, working with a first group of design partners.
“Loom” is a working name while we choose the company’s final name.
The founder
Loom was founded by Xavier Sorribas. As Global Director of UX at Yara International, he led the merger of separate UX teams into one global organisation of more than 120 people in 20 countries, across research, design, content, service design and operations.
He led Digital & UX Ops for Yara’s global design system, Ahua, working on executive support, the team, adoption and the case for its return on investment. Read the full design system case and the global UX team case on xaviersorribas.com.
He also writes about the fundamentals of UX, design operations and AI on Medium. The Loom articles are signed by him.
The Ahua story
Yara’s digital farming products served people at both extremes. In Asia and Africa they reached smallholder farmers on low-cost phones and weak networks. In Europe they served enterprise buyers on broadband, under EU regulation. A single uniform system would have failed one group or the other.
Several design systems already existed, including Fertilize, a React library for the professional market, and Ahua, a React Native library for low-end devices. The brief was to combine them into one foundation that many teams could share.
The result was a system of systems. Global foundations held brand, accessibility and content, with localisation built in. Core components and shared flows such as log in and consent sat above them. Regional systems inherited the global layers and extended them for their markets, and product libraries sat on top.
Nobody could be forced to use it. Yara is a federated organisation, so adoption had to be earned, quarter after quarter. Ahua became an official investment in 2021 through the company’s capital process, and it is still in production today.
- 20+products built on the system, by both leads’ counts
- 50+product teams adopted it, according to the Design System Lead
Sources: Leadership at Yara, design system case by Xavier Sorribas, Global Director of UX, and Ahua: Yara’s Global Design System by Alexander Toporov, Design System Lead. The figures are the authors’ own estimates and neither case publishes a method. Toporov counts 25+ products shipped by 2025.
What it taught us, and what Loom does about it
- A design system is a people system.Loom records owners, decisions and approvals, not only components.
- Adoption has to be earned.Loom shows each team what inheriting the system saves them, instead of blocking them.
- The regional layer is what made it spread.Layers are first-class in Loom, each with its own owner and rules.
- Building, adopting and proving impact are different jobs.Loom reports what was built, what was adopted and what it changed, separately.
- Organisations change shape.Layers can be merged or split as a planned migration, with an impact report.
Today Loom writes an owner field for every area and component it converts, for your team to fill in, and keeps agent drafts for review. Recorded approvals, layers, adoption and impact reports, and layer migrations are concepts in design. See the product page for what works today.
The first system
The first system converted with Loom is Story Atelier, the design system of Seamline, Xavier’s own product for connected service design. Read the case study.