Cohere Commerce is a B2B platform that connects consumer brands with independent retailers using AI-powered vendor intelligence — helping retail buyers discover and evaluate brands without relying on trade shows or cold outreach.
We worked with the Cohere team for two years as their embedded design team. For the entirety of the engagement, we were the only designers in the building.
The platform served four meaningfully different users — retail buyers, brand vendors, investors, and large retail chains — each with distinct jobs to do inside the same product. Designing for all of them without making the product feel fragmented was the central challenge across two years.
The product’s direction shifted multiple times as the team learned what the market actually needed. The design had to move with those shifts rather than lock the product in place. Research was embedded in everything — we sat in sales demos, watched users navigate live, and listened to what confused them and what clicked.
We redesigned the full platform twice.
The first version had a more modern, youthful aesthetic — approachable and contemporary. As the team refined its target market toward larger retail chains and institutional buyers, the feedback was consistent: the product needed to feel more trustworthy, more data-forward, more enterprise.
We did a complete UI overhaul — shifting from the warmer visual language to a structured, data-driven interface:
When we joined, two separate component libraries had accumulated from different contributors. Components looked different between screens. Engineering was implementing the same element multiple ways. Every new feature added inconsistency rather than resolving it.
Decision: rebuild the design system from scratch. We replaced both libraries with a unified system — one implementation reference for engineering, one visual language across the product. Features designed in the second year were faster to produce and more consistent than anything from the first.
After multiple iterations and direct user research, we defined four core workflows that retail buyers use on the platform. Each flow has a distinct purpose and moves the buyer through a different stage of vendor discovery.
The entry point to the retailer experience. Buyers find brands using different approaches depending on how they’re thinking:
The design challenge: search had to be genuinely flexible without being complicated. A buyer typing one word should get useful results. A buyer specifying ten criteria should also get useful results. Both needed to feel natural. When a brand looks promising, buyers save it to their private brand list — the starting point for the next flow.
The active evaluation phase. Buyers work through their private list deciding which brands are worth pursuing. Two distinct views served two fundamentally different types of evaluation:
Visual view — brand aesthetic, social presence, product imagery, visual identity. Designed for the gut-check phase: does this brand feel right for our stores? This can’t be answered from a spreadsheet.
Table/data view — performance metrics, sales velocity, distribution history, pricing tiers. Designed for due diligence: once a brand passes the visual check, do the numbers support stocking them?
Actions available during vetting:
After vetting, buyers have a shortlist — typically around 20 brands they’re interested in but not ready to commit to. Monitoring is the ongoing tracking of that shortlist over time.
Buyers follow brands to see how they’re developing: new product launches, distribution growth, social momentum, pricing changes. The key design requirement: the monitoring view had to surface change signals — what’s new or different since the last check — without requiring buyers to manually review each brand individually.
Allows buyers and consultants to generate structured vendor intelligence reports from their Cohere data and share them externally. Reports can be generated from a private saved brand list, a market category, or a curated brand selection.
Reports are generated by Cohere’s AI from the platform’s private vendor database — published as branded shareable links, accessible without a Cohere login. For consultants presenting vendor landscape analysis to retail chain clients, this replaces the manual process of exporting data and building presentations from scratch.
Brands on Cohere have five distinct areas of the product, built around visibility — understanding how they’re perceived, where they stand competitively, and how their applications are progressing.
The dashboard is built around a proprietary metric: the Cohere Score — a composite retail-readiness rating calculated from eight distinct dimensions, expressed on a scale of 0–100.
The Cohere Score is designed to function as an industry-standard benchmark — a way for retailers to quickly gauge whether a brand is ready for serious stockist conversations, and for brands to understand where they stand and what to improve. Designing it required making an eight-dimension calculation feel legible rather than opaque.
The dashboard also shows:
AI-powered review analysis aggregates publicly available reviews through AI to produce dimension-level scores across quality, pricing, in-store experience, packaging, and innovation — each scored individually, with explicit pros and cons and the underlying reviews available in full.
The retailer finder shows brands a pre-filtered list of vendor requests matching their category, location, and profile. Split-view layout: left panel shows ranked applicable opportunities; right panel shows full request detail and the application form. Brands apply without leaving the page, with form fields prefilling from their saved profile data.
A table of all active applications showing current stage, when status last changed, and retailer actions. When a retailer archives or moves a brand forward, the brand receives a notification immediately — removing the black box that most application processes become after submission.
The brand detail page is the brand’s public-facing presence on Cohere. Brand-managed: company information, brand story, product catalog, geographic reach, distribution history — all editable by the brand. Cohere-managed: review-derived insights, Cohere Score breakdown, competitive intelligence signals — brands can see this but can’t edit it.
Not every brand applying has an account. Guest users have to enter everything manually. Registered users have saved business profiles — application forms prefill automatically from profile data. We built strategic conversion prompts timed to the highest-friction moments: the conversion proposition is most tangible exactly when the friction is highest.
The product went from feeling unfinished in sales demos to holding its own against well-funded competitors. The design system gave engineering the room to ship faster and more consistently. The shift to a data-forward visual language positioned the product correctly for the enterprise buyers it was targeting.
Most importantly: the product started to reflect the strength of the data behind it. Cohere’s vendor intelligence was genuinely strong — the design’s job was to make that evident to anyone who landed on the platform.
★★★★★
I had the pleasure of working with Gytis for a long time, and he has consistently been one of the most thoughtful and dependable product designers I’ve worked with.
Gytis thinks deeply about the product, the user, and the business context behind every design decision. He is very strong at turning ambiguous ideas into clear, polished, usable experiences, and he brings a high level of taste and discipline to the work.
Gytis is someone I could trust with important product problems. He communicates clearly, takes feedback well, and has a calm, mature way of moving projects forward even when the direction is still evolving. That combination of creativity, judgment, and ownership made him a real partner to the product team!
Projects
We designed the full system from scratch — a campaign dashboard, template library, and a linear builder with side panel editing.
Six months across the full product — admin dashboard, adaptive testing, a KTU research experiment, and a broader UX restructure.
We designed the question bank, exam builder, Crew Evaluation Test, proctoring system, course reporting, and student test interface.
Reviews
★★★★★
I had the pleasure of working with Gytis for a long time, and he has consistently been one of the most thoughtful and dependable product designers I’ve worked with.
Gytis thinks deeply about the product, the user, and the business context behind every design decision. He is very strong at turning ambiguous ideas into clear, polished, usable experiences, and he brings a high level of taste and discipline to the work.
Gytis is someone I could trust with important product problems. He communicates clearly, takes feedback well, and has a calm, mature way of moving projects forward even when the direction is still evolving. That combination of creativity, judgment, and ownership made him a real partner to the product team!
★★★★★
"I came to Gytis looking for web designer. What I quickly realized is that Gytis's approach to design is to thoroughly immerse himself in the study of a client's company and then construct an information architecture which accurately and directly accomplishes the most important goals for the business. I have worked with all kinds of designers and creatives in the past, and Gytis stands head and shoulders above them all.”
★★★★★
"Gytis consistently demonstrated strong design skills, professionalism, and a great ability to collaborate smoothly with both the team and customer. His work left a very positive impression on our customers, and communication throughout the projects was always easy and constructive. I’d recommend him as a reliable and experienced designer."
★★★★★
"Gytis Mark has highly talented and motivated product designers. We worked together for a year with them collaborating on multiple projects during this time. Gytis Mark consistently built visually stunning designs while also paying attention to the user experience. Their attention to detail and intuitive designs resonated positively with our clients. They were open to feedback and incorporated them into his designs rapidly, which helped us to refine our product experience."
★★★★★
"It was an absolute pleasure working with the Gytis Mark on our web and mobile application analysis and design. The team displayed great talents in the user experience field while they worked with us. It's not just their technical skills that impress me, however. It is also their amazingly positive attitude that made it a joy to work together. I recommend working with the Gytis Mark without any doubt."
★★★★★
"The earliest stage of company building is absolutely foundational to ensure long-term success -- despite technically being an external contractors, Gytis's team was deep in the trenches with us, driving impact, understanding complex issues, and creating elegant UX solutions. We are extremely grateful for their thoughtfulness, positive attitude, and care. We know they can drive organizational impact."
★★★★★
"Gytis Mark joined the project at a very early stage with no previous knowledge of the industry. They were able to grasp complex ideas quickly and provide valuable product development ideas from the get go. They had a clear and transparent process and kept us well informed. He took full ownership of the project taking in from idea to product from 0 - 1.”
★★★★★
“Gytis Mark worked with my startup, Lifeplanner, for over a year focusing on product design, UX design and communication. Their team is extremely professional in what they do. They researched our industry, building a true understanding of the business, its customers, competitors and stakeholders. They are also open-minded and likable - a true team players who know when to lean back and listen and when to challenge. We are very satisfied with our collaboration and with Gytis Mark team's deliveries.”
★★★★★
"Working with Gytis on defense-sector projects at BPTI was a strong experience. He brought a level of design thinking and professionalism that isn't easy to find in a domain as specific and demanding as ours. He picked up the context quickly, asked the right questions, and delivered work that was both thoughtful and practical. I'd recommend him without hesitation."
★★★★★
"We've worked with Gytis Mark across a number of projects and what stands out every time is the genuine care they bring to the work. They put real time and research into each brief, considering every angle before settling on a direction, and he never approaches a project on autopilot. They listen properly, get under the skin of what the client actually needs, and delivers great design that does the strategic job it's meant to. I'd recommend Gytis Mark without hesitation to anyone looking for a designers who treat their work like it's their own."
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