They say if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. We’d rather make it together: with Studio Merge, and with our clients who build alongside us.
This one started over dinner. Two studios doing their own thing, driving their own growth and ambitions, until our paths crossed.
Two years ago, we attended an Awwwards conference in New York City. Conferences produce a lot of conversations, and most of them end with a bunch of business cards left behind in the hotel room. But that week, both our team and the founders of Studio Merge, a design studio from Porto, were invited to the conference VIP dinner. Away from the badge scanning and the booth talk, the conversation got real: how we run our studios, what we refuse to compromise on, and where we both wanted to go next.
Hosting our own agency founders event at FIT
Before the actual Awwwards conference started, we hosted an agency founders meetup event at the FIT headquarters in New York. This felt like an ideal opportunity for us, as the conference brings in all digital agency founders from around the world. Everyone knows how conferences go, you make small talk and move forward.
But with so many people from the same industry in the same city, we wanted to dive deeper. A casual small talk meetup before the conference, so you could already skip that part during the actual Awwwards conference and dive straight into deeper topics during the event.
Together with FIT (Flanders Investment & Trade) we were able to organize a pre-conference meetup in their meeting room in the New York Times building with some real Belgian waffles, pralines and cuberdons.
This was our first encounter with André and Sofia from Studio Merge, an award-winning graphic and web design studio from Porto, Portugal. We met at the Awwwards Conference and were both invited to the VIP Dinner in the evening. Coincidence or not, there we shared the same table and the conversations started.
After the conference we stayed in touch. Followed each other’s projects, newsletters, and when we noticed Studio Merge started building a presence in New York as well, we both saw a collaborative opportunity for our respective studios.
Two European studios, two complementary disciplines, one shared base. The conclusion was not hard to reach: Studio Merge is officially partnering with Weichie.
Design & development joining forces
With our rebrand, we sharpened our focus on what we do best: development. Websites, online stores, mobile and web applications, AI implementations, … built to run reliably for years. Studio Merge did the same exercise and landed on the other side of the equation: creative direction, branding, and design.
There is no overlap between us. There is also no gap. Two European studios with a more solid New York City base in the USA.
The handoff is where projects break
Anyone who has commissioned a digital project knows the pattern. A design studio hands over beautiful work, and a development team flattens it into something generic. Or a technically solid platform gets wrapped in a visual identity that says nothing. The problem is rarely talent. It is the handoff: two teams with different priorities, different vocabularies, and no shared accountability.
This partnership removes that handoff. Studio Merge drives creative direction and brand strategy. Weichie builds, deploys and maintains the platforms, stores, and applications. Both teams are grounded in New York, working as one unit on shared projects.
Design decisions are made with the build in mind, and technical decisions protect the design instead of eroding it.
What this means in practice
For clients in the US, it means access to European design and engineering without stitching together separate vendors. For brands in Europe, it means a direct line into the US market through teams that already operate there. In both cases, one conversation covers the full spectrum: strategy, identity, design, and development.
While the USA focuses on speed and future-proof developments, Europe focusses on reliability and privacy. Merging these two brings our clients the best of both worlds.
We are keeping our own names, our own offices, and our own specialisms. What changes is that projects which need both disciplines now run through one aligned team instead of two coordinated ones.
If you are building something that needs to look sharp and work properly, we would like to hear about it.
Let’s talk.
Weichie x Merge
