ProPortals
0→1 eCommerce marketplace. White-label SaaS for B2B suppliers.
ProPortals is white-label B2B eCommerce — a Shopify for lumber suppliers. I led design end-to-end across the storefront, buyer flow, dashboard, and design system.
- 2019–2020
- Lead Designer
- Founders + engineering
The problem
An industry running offline
Wholesale lumber and building materials still move on phone calls, faxed POs, and spreadsheet catalogs. Buyers had no real way to browse a mill's inventory online, and sellers had no way to publish one without a six-figure custom build.
Conservative workflows
Decades-old supplier relationships don't move to a SaaS tool overnight. Any solution had to feel credible to a 60-year-old mill owner on day one — not ask them to abandon what already worked.
Role
I joined as fractional founding designer to shape the MVP end to end — define core functionality, build the design system, and design responsive buyer and seller product. The scope ran from customizable storefronts and product creation through catalog management, collections, variations, and full ecommerce flows, plus go-to-market materials including the landing page and conference booth.
Approach
Brand and design system
Brand foundation
Industrial but approachable — confident type, restrained color, a mark that reads as credible to a legacy supplier and modern to a new ops lead onboarding their first digital storefront.
Design system
Built from day one to scale across the seller admin, the buyer storefront, and white-label theming on top. Tokens, components, and patterns let a new screen come together without re-inventing layout or state.
White-label customization
Each seller's storefront had to feel like theirs, not ours. The customization layer let sellers swap logo, palette, type, and hero treatment without touching code — the system handled accessibility and layout regardless of the brand applied on top.
Seller dashboard
Sellers needed a single screen that showed catalog, orders, and store health at a glance. The dashboard surfaces the few things that actually move the needle day to day — pending orders, low inventory, recent buyer activity — and pushes deeper management one click away.
Storefront and product
Storefront
Clean category structure, honest product imagery, and pricing that doesn't hide behind a contact form — designed to make a digital purchase feel as confident as a phone order with a known supplier.
Product detail
Lumber is a matrix of species, grade, dimension, length, and treatment. The PDP handles variation-heavy products without burying buyers in dropdowns, keeping specs, tiered pricing, and lead times legible at a glance.
Buyer experience
On the buyer side we focused on the patterns a contractor or procurement lead actually repeats — reorders, saved lists, quote requests, and clear delivery expectations. The goal was to remove friction without forcing buyers to abandon the habits that already worked.
Orders and messaging
Orders and fulfillment
A shared timeline kept status changes, edits, and exceptions visible to both seller and buyer — so a fulfillment update didn't need a follow-up email to land.
Messaging
B2B materials deals rarely close without a conversation. Inline messaging tied to specific orders and products kept that back-and-forth in context, instead of scattering it across phone and email.
Responsive
Most buyers were placing orders from a job site, not a desk. The system carried cleanly down to mobile — same components, same patterns, restructured for thumb-first interaction so a foreman could reorder framing lumber from a truck cab.
Outcome
The work shipped to customer pilots. My contribution was the design foundation that let a small team move quickly across product, brand, and go-to-market in parallel — and the GTM surface that carried the same system into the first buyer and seller conversations.
Go-to-market
Landing page focused on the seller story, plus collateral for conference booths where the team met suppliers face to face. The same design system carried into marketing so the brand felt continuous from first touch through onboarding.
Presence concept
A LinkedIn presence concept explored how the brand would show up in a feed full of legacy suppliers and trade publications — part of the launch narrative, not a record of traction.