Melaleuca: Aligning a global brand system with local market needs
Melaleuca needed a unified digital presence across 8 APAC markets — Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong — with one consistent brand and a seamless experience on every device. Working within the global design system from HQ, I led the localization design for the APAC rollout: adapting templates and visuals to each market's language, culture, and regulations, and executing the mobile-first relaunch across the region. The system rolled out market by market from 2022 to 2024; post-launch metrics below are from the Australia & New Zealand launch.
01Context & problem
As a global wellness brand, Melaleuca operates across markets with different languages, cultures, and shopping behaviors. The APAC relaunch had to unify 8 markets under one brand system without flattening local relevance — on a legacy platform strained by region-specific content and serving desktop-oriented templates to mobile-majority markets.
The challenge: keep the brand globally consistent while making every market feel local — across languages, regulations, payment habits, and shopping behaviors.
02Research & insights
- Market-specific friction: partnering with market managers across the 8 regions surfaced friction points a single rigid template couldn't serve — text length across languages, cultural usability expectations, and local merchandising habits.
- Mobile behavior: APAC traffic was mobile-majority, but the templates were desktop-oriented — a clear gap between where users were and what they were served.
03Design decisions
Four moves drove the APAC redesign:
- Local adaptation within the global system: the visual system came from global HQ — my job was making it work in 8 markets: adapting layouts and assets to each language's text length, local merchandising, and market-specific requirements while protecting brand integrity — not just translated strings.
- Product detail page redesign: legacy detail pages were largely hand-coded HTML that couldn't carry over to the new platform — rather than porting them, I redesigned the PDP from the ground up, restructuring the layout and content hierarchy for the new system.
- Mobile-first execution: led the responsive rollout across APAC, designing for the highest-traffic device first and scaling up to desktop.
- Cross-functional partnership: worked with market managers to surface region-specific friction, then with content and engineering teams to design and implement the adjustments — from merchandising tweaks to Korea's regulatory and payment requirements.
04Before vs. after
1 · Design system & browsing
2 · Mobile experience
3 · Market-specific flows — checkout, terms & shipping
One brand system, 8 markets: global consistency was the foundation — and local adaptation across language, culture, regulation, and payment was what made it feel native in every market.
05Outcome & reflection
- 86.02% user satisfaction — surpassing the corporate target of 83.50%, with a +3.02% lift immediately post-launch (measured in the Australia & New Zealand rollout).
- 97.3% web order success rate — transactional reliability maintained through the AU/NZ relaunch.
- A unified APAC digital ecosystem — rolled out market by market from 2022 to 2024, with the first-wave results validating the system for the markets that followed.
What I'd do differently: I would map each market's regulatory, payment, and legal requirements during the initial system design — not wave by wave. The Japan/Korea rollout surfaced needs the AU/NZ launch hadn't: Korea's strict regulations and local payment methods required adjustments to checkout, terms & conditions, and shipping flows, worked out in close coordination with country marketing, content, and engineering. Those adjustments fed into a market-entry checklist maintained by our PM — page-by-page needs per market, translation handoffs, regulatory and payment requirements — which made the Taiwan/Hong Kong and Singapore/Malaysia waves noticeably smoother. It's a practice I'd now push for from day one rather than arrive at mid-rollout.
06Beyond the relaunch
The APAC relaunch ran alongside a steady stream of design work — all built on the global templates and localized per market:
- Online enrolment — 8-market rollout: UI design for the member enrolment flow across all 8 markets, applying the same global-to-local approach to a conversion-critical form experience — local fields, formats, and requirements per market.
- Business app launch: design support for the business app rollout, keeping the visual and interaction language consistent with the web experience across markets.
- Ongoing campaign design: monthly banners and landing pages across the region — the recurring production work that kept 8 markets' promotional calendars on-brand.