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Case study — Brother · 2023

Industrial print, turned
into a digital platform.

How do you make a hardware-bound production process — direct-to-garment, transfer film, embroidery, sublimation — behave like software people want to use?

Client
Brother
Role
Product Designer & Product Owner
Year
2023
Platform
Cloud platform (PWA) · touch stations · kiosk
Scope
Product · UX · UI · PO
Product
myze.brother.digital
Brother Myze dashboard: orders today, total orders, two connected printers with temperature and ink levels, most sold products and colours, and an order chart.

The dashboard is the platform's face: orders, machine state and product performance in one place. Myze Analytics grew out of it — the same figures filtered by location and period for fulfillment centres, dropshippers and single users.

Click a screen to enlarge

In short

Hardware company, first digital product

Myze is a cloud platform for on-demand printing: create products, run QR-based fulfillment, connect shops like Shopify, and see what the machines are actually doing.

In 2020 Brother concluded that in industrial printing, digital services would decide the competition alongside world-class hardware. The goal was a platform that connects physical devices with digital services, opens new revenue streams and makes on-demand production more sustainable.

Internal UX capacity was thin at that point, and the plan explicitly included not becoming dependent on an external vendor. So the brief had two halves: ship a high-quality product fast, and leave behind a foundation Brother's own design and development team could carry.

A printer has one job. A platform around it has to serve four very different people without becoming four different products.

The challenge

Four audiences, one system

Dropshipper
Sells online, never touches a printer. Needs products, orders and margins — not machine parameters.
Operator
Stands at a fulfillment station, often with gloves on. Needs one task at a time, in large targets, at a glance.
Fulfillment centre
Runs many machines and shifts. Needs throughput, error rates and maintenance windows per printer and location.
Brother
Sells hardware and now a service. Needs a platform their own team can extend without an agency in the loop.

The difficulty was not the feature list. It was that all four succeed or fail in the same data model — and that a mistake on the production floor costs a physical garment, not an undo.

My contribution

Product design and product ownership

I owned the product and interaction design across the platform — information architecture, flows, UI, the analytics concept and the touch interface — and took product ownership for priorities and delivery.

That meant translating between two worlds daily: printing engineers who know exactly what a plate, a print face and a pre-treatment step are, and shop owners who never want to learn any of it. Every screen had to decide which of those two it was talking to.

Alongside the product work I set up patterns, components and handover documentation so Brother's growing in-house team could keep building in the same language — the part of the engagement that was meant to make the agency unnecessary.

Approach

Three decisions that carried the platform

01

One system across machine, shop and product

Before Myze, the machine, the order and the product lived in separate places. The platform ties them together: a printer reports its own state and history, an order carries the QR code that follows it through fulfillment, and a product holds every parameter production needs — SKUs, colours, sizes, plates, print faces.

Machine state is a first-class surface, not a settings tab. Ink levels, temperature, workload, throughput and the next maintenance window sit where someone responsible for output actually looks.

Each connected printer gets its own dashboard: levels, errors, maintenance countdown and the job currently on the platen, with the print history underneath.
Product management holds the parameters production depends on. A standing table of contents keeps a long, technical form navigable instead of endless.

02

Creating an article should feel like design, not data entry

The Myze Designer is where a shop owner turns a blank garment into a sellable article: place the artwork, pick colours, see the print area, check the resolution warning before it becomes a misprint.

The screen carries production truth without speaking production language. Print mode, plate size and image properties are all present, but the preview stays the subject — what you see is what leaves the machine.

Create article — the preview is the subject; print mode, plate and image properties sit beside it. The stepper keeps a multi-stage job visible without hiding the result.

03

The production floor gets its own interface

Fulfillment is not desk work. Pick and pack happens standing, at speed, often with gloves — so the floor got a touch interface of its own rather than a shrunken version of the admin UI: one step at a time, large targets, scan-driven, no ambiguity about which order is in your hands.

The same pattern carried into retail. Myze works with digital shops, and with a kiosk setup for stores and events where a customer configures a product on the spot and the order goes straight into production.

The touch interface is installed at the individual fulfillment stations and walks an operator through the pick and pack steps of one order.
The kiosk variant puts the same flow in a store or at an event: choose, customise, order — production starts from the same system.

Result

From hardware vendor to service provider

Myze turned complex on-demand print workflows into a clean SaaS platform — and let Brother sell a service alongside the machine. It bridged hardware and digital, opened new business for their customers, and became a pillar of Brother's digital transformation roadmap.

The floor is a different product than the desk.

Same data, same system, but pick and pack earned its own touch interface instead of a responsive compromise.

Machine state belongs in the product, not in a service portal.

Putting ink, workload and maintenance next to orders is what made the platform useful to the people who run the printers.

Analytics is only useful in someone's unit of work.

Location and time filters mattered more than more charts: a dropshipper and a fulfillment centre look at the same numbers with different questions.

A good handover makes the agency unnecessary.

Patterns, components and documentation were part of the deliverable, so Brother's in-house team could take the platform forward.

What I take from it

Digitising a physical process is not a UI problem. It is deciding who has to succeed at which station.

The screens that mattered most were the ones where I stopped trying to serve everyone at once — the printer view for the person responsible for output, the touch station for the person with gloves on, the designer for the person who only cares about the artwork.

It is also the project that taught me how much of product ownership is translation: between engineering language and shop language, between what the hardware can promise and what the interface is allowed to claim.