Uplight

Uplight’s Marketplace is a white-label e-commerce platform that energy utilities use to sell efficiency products, smart thermostats, LED lighting, EV chargers, with instant rebates baked into the price. The catch is that it can’t look like Uplight: each utility runs the store as its own branded shop, from the logo down to the footer.

I worked across Uplight’s product lines as a product designer, and owned the part of Marketplace that made that white-label promise real, the configurable system, and the onboarding that gets a new utility live on it.

Every new utility meant re-skinning the store, and doing it by hand was slow, error-prone, and easy to get subtly wrong, an off-brand color here, a failed contrast check there. The design problem wasn’t a screen; it was a system: what exactly can a client change, and what has to stay fixed so the experience never breaks?

And it had to be repeatable. Onboarding couldn’t depend on a designer hand-holding every launch, it needed to be something a project manager and a client could run together.

I designed the configuration around a tight set of rules, so brand freedom never came at the cost of usability or accessibility.

I broke the store into seven configurable elements, name, logo, top navigation, global colors, footer, typography, and a multi-typeface option, and defined exactly how each one behaves when a utility supplies its brand.

The key move was separating brand from meaning. A utility can change its palette, but the semantic colors hold across every instance: green always signals savings and instant rebates; orange always signals a sale and drives the add-to-cart and checkout actions. That’s what lets the same UX feel native to PSEG, BGE, ComEd, or Focus on Energy without re-teaching customers what a color means.

To make onboarding repeatable, I authored the Marketplace Configuration Guide, a single document that turns a bespoke setup into a clear, self-serve-ish process. It tells a utility exactly what to send (brand colors as Hex/RGB/CMYK, no Pantones; a vector logo; font files; any web style guide), walks through every configurable element with examples, and explains the semantic color and accessibility rules up front.

It’s the artifact that streamlined client onboarding: instead of a back-and-forth discovery for every launch, a project manager and client can follow one guide and get a branded, accessible store live.

The result is a system where any utility can stand up its own Marketplace, fully branded, accessible by default, and consistent with the patterns customers already understand. The configuration guide gave product managers and clients a shared playbook, which is exactly what streamlined onboarding looks like in practice.

White-label work taught me that the real deliverable is a system of constraints, not a comp. The hard, valuable decisions were about what to lock down, semantics and accessibility, so that everything else could safely flex.

And documentation is design. The configuration guide did more to scale Marketplace than any single screen, because it let other people launch the experience correctly without me in the room.