About
We are small on purpose.
raxel is a workshop. We take a small number of projects each year and treat each of them like the only one. We work the way a good small studio always has — close to the work, no layers, no theatre.
A note from the studio
raxel exists because the best work we've ever shipped came from small rooms — three or four people, one product, one set of decisions, and no layer of translation in between. Everything we do is shaped by trying to keep that room intact.
That means saying no more than we say yes, taking fewer projects than we're asked to, and writing every line as if we'd be the ones inheriting it. It also means we're probably not the right studio for everyone — and that's the point.
How we work
Small on purpose
We stay small so the people working on your project are the people you met. No PMs forwarding messages, no offshore handoffs.
Product craft over process
We make the smallest right thing, ship it, and respond to what we learn. Process exists to serve the work, not the other way around.
We write the code we'd inherit
Production-grade from day one. The codebase you take home is one you can hand to your next hire without an apology.
Design and engineering, one team
Type tokens land in the repo as design tokens. The mark vector gets shipped from Figma to a component. The boundary is a habit, not a real thing.
In the workshop
Two open-source projects, in public.
Between client work we build tools we want to use. Right now that's two open-source projects in the same family of ideas — the kind of work that quietly sharpens everything else we do. We'll publish case studies as they ship.
Work that fits us best
We have strong opinions about who we're right for.
Yes — this is us
- Early-stage SaaS with a small founding team
- Internal tools that have outgrown what they were meant to be
- Products with real users but no design system yet
- Teams replacing a prototype stack with the real thing
- Founders who want to be hands-on in the work
Probably not us
- Engagements with three layers of project management
- Pure marketing sites with no product behind them
- Long-running maintenance of code we didn't write
- Anything where the brief is “make it disruptive”