“They rewrote our onboarding in six weeks and doubled activation. What I did not expect was how much better our own team got at design review afterwards.”
The studio
Twelve people who like finishing things
Founded in 2016 in Lisbon. We are small on purpose — small enough that the people who sold you the project are the people doing it.
We started Nordwell after one too many handovers that fell apart.
Between us we had shipped a lot of good work that quietly decayed once the agency left — design systems nobody owned, codebases nobody understood, research nobody could find. The work was fine. The handover was the problem.
So we built a studio around it. Your engineers pair with ours from the first cycle. Decisions get written down where your team can read them. Documentation is part of the definition of done, not a line item at the end that gets cut when the timeline slips.
Nine years later, 94% of our clients come back for a second project — which we take as evidence that the approach works, and that leaving properly is the best sales pitch we have.
- Building products together
- 9yrs
- Products shipped to production
- 60+
- People across four timezones
- 12
- Of clients start a second project
- 94%
Principles
Four things we will not trade away
These come up in every project. It is easier to say them at the start than to argue about them in month three.
Working software beats a deck
Every two-week cycle ends with something running in a browser. Slides are for summarising decisions, never for making them.
Cut scope early, loudly
Almost every project we take on is too big at the start. We find that out in week two rather than month four, and we say so in writing.
Accessibility is not a phase
It is a property of the component, checked in CI. Retrofitting it costs five times more and is never as good.
Leave nothing locked up
Repos, design files, research and reasoning are yours as we go. If our leaving would break something, we built it wrong.
The team
Who you will actually work with
No account managers. The people below are the ones in your project channel.
Ines Marchetti
Founder & Principal Designer
Started Nordwell after a decade leading design at two health-tech companies. Still does the first sketch on every project.
Daniel Okoro
Engineering Lead
Front-end architect with a long history of unpicking other people's build pipelines. Writes the tests first, genuinely.
Saoirse Byrne
Design Systems Lead
Builds component libraries that survive reorgs. Has strong, well-argued opinions about focus states.
Kenji Watanabe
Product Strategist
Ex-founder, now the person who asks what happens if nobody wants this. Runs our discovery weeks.
Amara Diallo
Senior Product Designer
Specialises in dense, data-heavy interfaces where a wrong click has consequences. Prototypes obsessively.
Lukas Berger
Accessibility Engineer
Audits with a screen reader before a browser. Turned our WCAG checklist into automated CI gates.
How we work
Five steps, no mystery
You always know what happens next, what it costs, and what we need from you.
- 01
Discover
A week of interviews, analytics archaeology and competitive teardown. We leave with a written problem statement everyone actually agrees on.
- 02
Define
Flows, information architecture and a prototype thin enough to test but real enough to argue about. Scope gets cut here, not later.
- 03
Design
Interface design in a component-driven system, with tokens, states and edge cases handled before a single line of production code.
- 04
Build
Two-week cycles, working software at the end of each, deployed behind a flag. Your engineers pair with ours the entire way.
- 05
Ship & hand over
Launch, instrument, then transfer everything — repos, design files, documentation and the decisions behind them.
Clients
What people say afterwards
“Nordwell is the rare studio that leaves the codebase better than they found it. Six months after handover we are still shipping on the foundation they built.”
“The audit was blunt and completely right. They gave us a ranked list, then stayed and worked through the top half with our engineers.”
Have something worth building?
Tell us what you are working on. We will reply within two working days with honest thoughts on whether we are the right studio for it.