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LisbonNew YorkFounded 2017

A small studio of senior hands,
founded by two people who still ship the work.

Mewan is an independent fourteen-person studio pairing brand strategy with product engineering. We do not layer account managers between you and the people drawing the screens, and we do not pass your project to a junior once the contract is signed.

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A note from the principals

You will work with the two people whose names are on the door.

Portrait of founding partner Inês Carvalho in the Lisbon studio
Inês Carvalho, Founding Partner — Design. Previously, design lead at Apple, where she worked on the first generation of the App Store redesign.

I left Apple in 2016 because I wanted to make work that travelled with the people who commissioned it — not work that disappeared into a department. Most of our clients are first-time founders or growth-stage CMOs who have already seen two or three agencies disappoint them, and what they are usually buying back is access.

At Mewan the person whose name is on the deck is the person who attends the workshop, draws the wireframes, and reviews the code at the end. There is no producer between us and you, and there is no rebate to a junior team after the kickoff.

Portrait of founding partner Marcus Halevi in the New York office
Marcus Halevi, Founding Partner — Engineering. Spent six years at Stripe on the dashboard and Atlas product surfaces before co-founding Mewan.

Inês and I started Mewan in 2017 because the agency model kept breaking at the same seam: senior partners sold the work, then handed it to a team the client never met. We wrote our engagement letters the opposite way — the senior team that closes the deal is the senior team that builds the product, end to end.

If you sign with Mewan, the fourteen names on this page are the fourteen people who will touch your build. We staff every sprint in-house from our two offices, and we cap concurrent projects at five so the founders stay close to the code.

— Inês & Marcus

The bench

Fourteen senior practitioners. Two offices. No contractors, no offshore handoff.

Every person below has shipped at least one product end-to-end before joining Mewan. We list them by name and discipline so you know exactly who you are buying — not a capacity chart, not a logo wall.

  • Portrait of product designer Sofia Almeida

    Sofia Almeida

    Product Design · Lisbon

    Specialises in onboarding flows for SaaS, with a craft background in printed editorial systems.

  • Portrait of front-end engineer Theo Brand

    Theo Brand

    Front-end Engineering · New York

    Maintainer of the Mewan UI design system; ships production React at a senior level for the last eight years.

  • Portrait of brand strategist Helena Vargas

    Helena Vargas

    Brand Strategy · Lisbon

    Translates positioning into a system that survives contact with engineering — naming, voice, and identity rails.

  • Portrait of motion designer Daniel Okafor

    Daniel Okafor

    Motion & Prototyping · New York

    Builds the interactive prototypes that pre-sell the final product to your board before a line of code is written.

  • Portrait of full-stack engineer Beatriz Sousa

    Beatriz Sousa

    Full-stack Engineering · Lisbon

    Leads the data layer on every fintech and SaaS build, with a quiet preference for boring, durable databases.

  • Portrait of art director Jonas Weber

    Jonas Weber

    Art Direction · New York

    Comes from a print-magazine background; brings the same discipline to a landing page that he once brought to a cover.

  • Portrait of UX researcher Marta Lima

    Marta Lima

    UX Research · Lisbon

    Runs the early discovery interviews that anchor every brief; clients often keep her findings long after launch.

  • Portrait of iOS engineer Anand Patel

    Anand Patel

    iOS Engineering · New York

    Has shipped seven consumer apps into the App Store top 100 in his career; leads our mobile squad.

  • Portrait of illustrator Clara Duarte

    Clara Duarte

    Illustration & Iconography · Lisbon

    Draws the bespoke marks and editorial illustrations that give each Mewan project its own visual signature.

  • Portrait of back-end engineer Lukas Hoffmann

    Lukas Hoffmann

    Back-end Engineering · New York

    Owns infrastructure on every project; his quiet preference is the deployment pipeline you forget about.

  • Portrait of copywriter Elena Ribeiro

    Elena Ribeiro

    Voice & Copy · Lisbon

    Writes the words that survive the redesign — taglines, microcopy, and the brand book no one deletes.

  • Portrait of creative technologist Mateo Reyes

    Mateo Reyes

    Creative Technology · New York

    Builds the WebGL and generative moments that make award juries write our name down; the rest of the work, too.

  • Portrait of operations lead Renata Lopes

    Renata Lopes

    Studio Operations · Lisbon

    Keeps five concurrent projects on schedule without ever becoming the layer a client has to chase for an update.

  • Portrait of design system lead Yuki Tanaka

    Yuki Tanaka

    Design Systems · New York

    Co-maintains the Polaris Forge kit on GitHub; designs the rails every other designer and engineer inherits.

How we work

Four commitments we put in writing on every engagement.

  1. 01

    Founding partners on every project.

    Inês or Marcus — usually both — are present at the kickoff, present at the weekly review, and present in the codebase or Figma file on the day your site goes live. No client of Mewan has ever worked with us without having met one of the founders in person or on a call.

  2. 02

    100% in-house. No bench, no outsourcing.

    The fourteen people on this page are the only people who will work on your project. We do not subcontract, white-label, or hand overflow to a partner agency. If we cannot staff a project with our own senior team, we do not take the project.

  3. 03

    Fixed price, with a 14-day satisfaction guarantee.

    Every sprint is a written fixed price. If the work delivered in the first fourteen days does not meet the brief we agreed, you pay nothing for that sprint and we re-scope. This is in our standard contract, not a sales concession.

  4. 04

    Eleven weeks, on average, from kickoff to launch.

    Our median go-to-live for a brand-plus-web MVP is eleven weeks — roughly a quarter of the six-month agency default. We hit this by capping concurrent projects at five and protecting the design and engineering bands from drift.

By the numbers

The metrics a Series A–C CMO will scan before reading another sentence.

140+

launches delivered since 2017

Across web, brand, and product surfaces for clients in eleven countries.

92%

of new work from referrals

The remaining eight percent still arrive from a previous client's introduction.

78

Net Promoter Score, last 40 engagements

Measured independently at project close by the client, not by Mewan.

27

Awwwards Site of the Day awards

Earned between 2018 and 2024; FWA Agency of the Year shortlist in 2022 and 2023.

Open-source work: Mewan UI and Polaris Forge together hold 18,000+ GitHub stars, maintained by our design-systems team.

We chose senior over scalable. We chose in-house over outsourced. We chose fourteen people who care about the craft over a hundred people who care about the headcount.

That is the entire business plan.

— Inês Carvalho & Marcus Halevi, founding partners

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