Flatstudio × Mollybet: 17 Months Inside Europe’s Most Complex Betting Product

There are products where a designer creates screens and hands them to developers. And there are products where you first learn the difference between dark orders and cashout mechanics, study sports trading — and only then open Figma.

Mollybet was the second type.

On March 22, 2023, James Clark sent us the brief. Mollybet is a sports trading platform founded in 2008. It aggregates odds from 15+ bookmakers and exchanges — Betfair, Betdaq, SBOBet, PS3838, Pinnacle, Singbet, and others — into one account. It’s not a sportsbook. It’s closer to a sports trading infrastructure platform. Technically, it was one of the strongest products on the market. Visually, though, it looked exactly like a system built by engineers for engineers — especially the kind who love Excel spreadsheets. But honestly, that’s exactly the kind of challenge we love.

The task sounded simple: turn it into a product partners could take, customize under their own brand, and sell. Sell is the important word here. Without breaking the workflows professional traders rely on. By adding a sportsbook for a new audience. By building a scalable design system. And by creating a marketing website that could finally explain and sell the product. Oh — and also attract a younger audience.

The Team

On our side: me as Creative Director, Elena as Project Manager, and Roman as Product Interface Designer — who grew into a Design Lead during this project. On Mollybet’s side: Gabriel Burne as Head of Product and James Clark as Dev Lead.

We worked closely together: weekly technical discussions, video calls with cameras always on, and, inevitably, regular appearances from BeReal and Trip — our dogs from Lisbon. After 17 months, Gabriel and James joked that our dogs had gathered enough corporate intelligence that we should now be careful around unfamiliar dogs on the street 😄.

But seriously, the team was amazing. Even now, I still consider this one of the warmest and most enjoyable collaborations we’ve ever had.

What We Built

The scope became much larger than the original brief suggested. Here’s what went into those 17 months:

Trading Platform — redesign of the core product. A central terminal with real-time odds from 15+ bookmakers, order books, win-loss grids, position tracking, and cashout mechanics. All inside a high-density interface where every pixel carried information.

Sportsbook — a completely new section. Before this project, the platform only supported trading. We added a full sportsbook experience for a more casual audience, with a separate navigation architecture so the two user groups wouldn’t interfere with each other.

Betslip and betting coupons. The price-comparison betslip for Trade became one of the most complex UI elements in the project. We had to display odds from 12 bookmakers, allow users to choose the best price, and place orders — all inside a compact mobile layout. The feature went through three rounds of A/B testing.

Design system with 981 components. We built a multi-theme architecture with a complete token system covering color, typography, motion, spacing, responsive grids, and navigation — plus Dev Mode documentation for James’s development team.

White-label partner themes. Thanks to the token architecture, adapting the product for a new partner theme now takes about two days.

Gen Z concept. This direction appeared after we realized the product had no brand book or user personas. Instead of creating one concept, we developed two. The main concept went into production. The Gen Z direction was handed over to the client as a ready-to-use foundation. This is where the case study starts, and this is where you can see the visuals.

Marketing website. We designed and coded the website from scratch. The old site looked more like internal developer documentation. The new one sells the product to three audiences at the same time: traders, B2B partners, and liquidity providers.

PWA assets, logo facelift, and marketing materials. We also created banners, email campaigns, and a pitch deck for the sales team.

Four Lessons, Four Articles

This project was too large to fit into a single article without losing important details. So we split it into four separate stories — each focused on a specific challenge and solution.

Design System with 981 Components: Mollybet’s White-Label Engine →

How we built a token architecture that allowed a new partner theme to be added in two days. Why multi-theme support is not just a feature of a design system — but its real purpose. For product teams and founders building B2B products with white-label models.

Why Your Betslip Is Wrong: UX for a Trading Terminal →

Professional bettors and casual bettors use completely different mental models. That means they need different approaches to information hierarchy. This article covers order books, pinning, split view, A/B testing for the betslip, and why data density is never just a layout problem. For designers and product teams working in iGaming and fintech.

Mollybet Gen Z: Two Concepts, One Product →

What do you do when a client has no brand book or personas — only a comment like “we want to attract a younger audience”? This article explains how the lack of documentation turned into two separate creative directions — and why that became the right decision. For teams designing financial tools for a new generation of users.

The Website That Didn’t Exist: Mollybet Marketing Landing Page →

How we built a website from scratch that could sell a technically complex B2B product to three different audiences without separate landing pages. About copy architecture, using real screenshots as proof, and why a website is the first sales call that happens without you.

What We Learned

Projects at this scale always teach you more than expected. Here are a few things we took away from 17 months with Mollybet:

Domain knowledge is not a bonus — it’s the entry requirement. Gabriel and James spoke like developers from day one. We had two options: either learn the product at the same level as their team, or spend every meeting asking about basics. The first few months were mostly analysis, proposing solutions, receiving criticism, and coming back with improved versions. After that, collaboration became incredibly effective.

A design system is a decision you make once. And it becomes very expensive if you make the wrong one. 981 components across multiple states and themes took longer to validate than expected. Not because the architecture was bad — but because the platform itself was highly complex. Building the right token architecture from day one was the only way to avoid rebuilding everything later.

Lack of brand documentation is not a blocker. At the time we created the concepts, Mollybet had no brand book or personas. So we materialized two clear directions and showed the difference. That allowed the client to make an informed decision instead of simply approving the only option presented to them.

People are the core of every project. A carefully assembled team — where every specialist matches the product’s complexity and requirements — is 90% of success. Projects are not built by processes. They are built by people behind those processes.

The Main Lesson

A complex technical product does not become easier to understand because of a cleaner UI. It becomes easier to understand when the design team understands the domain logic more deeply than expected.

That’s why, during the first months of Mollybet, we spent more time listening and asking questions than designing. In the end, it became the best investment we made during the entire project.

If you’re building a complex iGaming, fintech, or SaaS product and need a team that understands the domain — not just design — let’s talk.

Our Dedicated Product Team and Post-MVP Evolution retainers were built specifically for projects like this.