The challenges of designing a white label product

Working at Wunder Mobility for a while now, I can definitely say I had my ups and downs designing a white label product. So I decided to share a little bit of what I experienced and my learnings. Let’s start with what is a white label product:

A white-label product is a product or service produced by one company (the producer) that other companies (the marketers) rebrand to make it appear as if they had made it The name derives from the image of a white label on the packaging that can be filled in with the marketer’s trade dress. White label products are sold by retailers with their own trademark but the products themselves are manufactured by a third party.

Based on the term definition above we can conclude that the business model for the company building the White Label Product is a B2B2C, and that’s where the complexity starts. For example, at Wunder Mobility our product goal is to enable our clients to provide sustainable mobility services to end-users. So let’s check a little bit of the business model challenges.

Challenges of the Business Model (B2B2C)

Whenever a company thinks about its product development process and how to make this process smooth, a ton of methodologies/product terms appear. Among these is Roadmap, Product validation, Scrum, Agile…. but the one that is interesting to us at this point is Product-Market Fit.

Product market fit can be defined simply by Wikipedia (not a great source though 😅) as the degree to which a product satisfies a strong market demand (niche).

Read more about product-market fit here

Finding a Product Market Fit for a B2B2C can be a hell of a challenge, here are some of them:

• Multiple stakeholders: with multiple clients with different needs on their table, it can be quite of a challenge to find the middle ground between all of them. This leads to my next item.
• Your company probably doesn’t want to become an agency: If you start building your product for one client you eventually become an agency, which is fine if that’s the way you wanna go, but be aware that this also makes you vulnerable in case your client decides to stop using your product.
• Your clients' success is your success: Each of your clients has their own business needs and niche, so your Product-Market Fit has to be flexible enough to be adapted and reflect their Product-Market Fit
• An extra reason that I can add is related to the mobility industry. Mobility industry is one of the most fast-paced ones, growing and scaling at high speed, you really need to be ahead of the game to predict what’s coming.

But you came to this article to know about the Design Challenges, so let’s jump into that (even though business, tech, and product knowledge are all connected and can give you some miles ahead if you understand them all )

Challenges & learnings of designing a white label product

In the middle of the context presented above + having in mind a cross-functional team setup, a lot of design challenges can show up while you’re working on your product:

1) Client needs vs End-user needs: very often, what clients request from you is not necessarily what end-users need and your clients will only find that out when you put a solution on the market. As the company enables the clients to provide a service, it’s important that you as a designer and part of a product team validate the solution beforehand

Learnings:

• During the discovery or solution validation phase make sure you collect and validate needs from multiple clients and end-users (from my experience, after the third feedback session the insights start to repeat).
• When end users are not available (they can be really hard to reach because clients are a barrier between you both), check competitors, and try internal testing, especially with testing customer support because they can be the voice of the users inside the companies.
• Make sure you align the expectations of the clients based on end-users needs.

2) Customizable designs: Even though your client bought a white label product from you, they expect to be able to customize it, so they can provide their users the look and feel of their brand.

Learnings:

• Common patterns are your friend because they tend to work for most of the cases, so make sure you follow some in your User Interface solutions
• Keep designs clean and simple, with few colors as possible. This will help your clients' customization be nice and neat.
• Design system & library will enable you to fast validate solutions and ideas, just make sure to build a strong and consistent one to follow common patterns.

3) Customization service: based on my experience, most of the time clients don’t have a dedicated designer to work on the customization of their product. So, it’s also important that you prevent mistakes to happen but enable clients to apply their brand language to the product.

Learnings:

• Whenever possible, create smart tools that let them know the possible UI problem. For example, contrast UI checks between buttons' background color and text color and size.
• White label doesn’t mean blank label. Make sure you provide some standard text and information that allows your clients to have a starting point to launch their product.

4) Localization matters: When you building/designing a global product, make sure you understand that group of users. For example: Payments app behaviors in Brazil are very different from Germany because they have different legislation that influences your product behavior.

Learning:

• Be ahead of that, be curious, make questions, and try to understand the background of the clients and their end-users. Be proactive!

5) Last but definitely not least: Make peace with yourself when it comes to not designing innovative UI, that’s not the goal of your (and probably any) white label product. Your designs are supposed to enable clients to launch their business faster to the market, not to win an award for the UI. So leave your ego in a small box in your basement.

The advantages of having a white label product

With so many blockers on the design and business side, you might be wondering why would someone decide to launch a product using a white label one. Here are some pretty good reasons:

• Starting with a white-label product enables the business to cut off years of development time and money. Focusing on what is important for the business: providing a service
• Attached to the item above, by developing a product from scratch you will probably spend a lot of time validating the idea, solution and covering up bugs which also demands a lot of time
• It allows you to consume experience from companies that are already established in the market
• It allows you to have a “ready-to-use” solid product
• It allows you to enable and disable features that are important for your business
• Saves the costs of having specialized teams working on your product

Designing and building a white label product can be quite challenging but it definitely enables you to learn a lot about what I call the three foundation pillars of product development (Business, Users, Engineering).

By the end of the day as a product designer, the most important thing is to be empathetic with your users (clients or end-users), understand the constraints, and provide a better solution than yesterday. That’s where the iterative process comes in ;)

If you have questions or also would like to share your thoughts on it, drop a comment below.