Eleven people, one workshop
Founded in 2014 above a bike shop on NW Couch Street. Still there, one floor up, with the same eleven people and no plans to become a consultancy.
Why we kept both halves
Halden started as a two-person web shop. For the first four years we built sites, handed them over, and watched them quietly rot — because nobody we handed them to could change anything, and the vendor who built them had moved on.
In 2018 a client asked us to fix a booking system their previous agency had built. It took four months and taught us the thing the business is now built on: the website and the software behind it are the same problem, and splitting them between two companies guarantees they will disagree.
So we stopped doing one half. The people who design the site also write the code, and the people who write the code are still on the project a year later. It makes us slower to start and much faster to finish.
We have turned down work that did not fit this — a rebrand-only engagement, a pitch for an app with no maintenance plan, a proposal that assumed the client would find someone else to run what we built. Saying no is a surprisingly large part of the job.
Four rules we do not bend
These have cost us work. We keep them because the work we lose to them is the work we did not want anyway.
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Say the difficult thing early
Since 2014If the brief is wrong, we say so in week one while it is still cheap to change. It is the least comfortable part of the job and the reason most of our projects finish well.
Roughly one brief in five gets a smaller recommendation.
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The people who sold it do the work
Non-negotiableNo delivery team you never met. The designer in your kickoff meeting is the designer drawing the screens, and the engineer quoting the estimate is the engineer writing the code.
Zero handover documents longer than one page.
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You own everything
Every contractSource, infrastructure, accounts, documentation. We work in your cloud tenancy. If we ever stop working together, nothing stops working with you.
No proprietary platform, no rented black box.
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Show it working, early and often
Since 2018A staging URL in week three and a Friday demo every week after, including the weeks where there is bad news. Problems found in week six cost a week; the same problem found at launch costs a quarter.
Median 31 days from kickoff to a real user opening it.
Who you actually get
Eleven of us, no account managers. Everyone here writes code or draws, including the two who run the studio.
Ines Kovac
Founder, design
Tobias Brandt
Founder, engineering
Rae Miyamoto
Design systems
Dele Okonkwo
Platform, infrastructure
Hana Sørensen
Product engineering
Mateo Aguirre
Front-end
Priya Nadar
Content, research
Jonas Weiss
Delivery
Initials stand in for photographs in this reference build.
Plain facts
The things people ask in the first call, answered without a discovery process.
How we charge
Fixed price for a fixed scope, with the scope written down before we start. Time and materials only for platform work where the shape genuinely cannot be known in advance, and we cap it either way.
Who we work best with
Organisations with a real internal owner for the project — the person who can say "no, that is wrong" on a Friday afternoon. Without that, we guess, and you pay for the guessing.
Where we are weak
Consumer apps at scale, anything needing a native mobile build, and projects where the timeline is fixed by a trade show.
Come and argue with us.
The first call is a conversation, not a pitch. Bring the problem you cannot get solved and we will tell you what we would do.
Get in touch