Every site we build is Framer now

I joined the studio in 2022 to build websites the old way: a designer’s files, a developer’s repository, and a client who could change a headline only by emailing one of us. It worked, and it was the wrong shape for the businesses we serve. A cidery does not need a codebase. It needs to change the price of a case on a Friday afternoon.

So we moved everything to Framer, and every site we have shipped since is built there. The trade is simple. We give up some of the freedom a custom build offers, and the client gets a site they can actually run: text, images, the whole catalog, without a ticket and without breaking the layout.

The design side of the studio was skeptical for about a month. The concern was that a tool would flatten the work into the same template everyone else uses. It did not, because the constraint was never the tool; it was the discipline of designing a system the client cannot break. That discipline is good for the design.

What a food or drink brand needs from a website is short: the product, the story in one screen, where to buy it, and a way to write to a human. Speed matters more than motion, and a site that loads in under a second on a phone in a field sells more cider than one with a scroll-jacked hero. Framer makes the fast version the easy version.

The handover changed most of all. We used to hand over documentation nobody read. Now we sit with the client for an hour, add a product together, publish it together, and leave. The project is finished when they can do it without us, and they usually can before the hour is up.

We still write code when a project needs it — a custom component, an integration, a form that talks to a warehouse. But the site itself belongs to the client, in a tool they can open. That is the whole point of the work.