A
Strategy before pixels.
If a kickoff jumps straight into colour palettes, it has skipped the question that matters: what is the website actually for, and how will we know it worked.
About the studio
A studio that takes craft seriously and itself less so.
Vapordex Studio is eleven people working out of a converted office in Bangsar South. Half of us are designers, the other half engineers, and we have built marketing sites, commerce stores and internal tools for Malaysian and ASEAN brands since 2014.
How we got here
Started as two friends. Stayed small on purpose.
The studio began in 2014 when our founders, both former product designers from Singapore and Penang, packed a single MacBook between them and rented desk space above a kopitiam in Bangsar. The brief from day one was unfashionable: stay small, take fewer projects, ship things you would actually link to from your portfolio.
A decade later we still work that way. We keep the team at around eleven so every project has at least one senior on it from kickoff to launch. We turn down work that does not feel like a fit. And we measure ourselves not on award shelves but on whether the brands we work with come back two and three projects later.
Six things we will probably die on the hill defending.
B
Small teams ship faster.
A two-designer, two-engineer pod will out-build a fifteen-person agency every time. We keep our pods small and the chain of command flatter than the studio sofa.
C
Performance is design.
If a page loads in five seconds nobody sees the rest of the design. Lighthouse scores are not optional, they are a brand promise.
D
Accessibility is non-negotiable.
We design and ship to WCAG 2.2 AA as a baseline, because anything less is shipping a site that some of your customers cannot use.
E
Plain language always.
If the copy reads like it was assembled from a buzzword bingo card, it is the wrong copy. We rewrite, ruthlessly.
F
Launch is the start.
The interesting work begins the day real users land on the site. Our retainers are built around that, not as an afterthought.
Eleven humans, no ping-pong table.
Every project gets a senior designer and senior engineer as named leads. Here are a few of them.
SP
Suraya Putri
Co-founder & Design Director
Former product designer at a Singapore fintech. Spends weekends drawing tropical fruit and shouting at her sourdough.
DC
Daniel Chong
Co-founder & Engineering Director
Polyglot engineer who can rant about React rendering for forty minutes without a single sip of teh tarik.
NA
Nurul Aisyah
UX Research Lead
Runs the research practice. Has interviewed customers in eight languages and one regrettable Klang dialect attempt.
PR
Prashant Rao
CRO & Analytics Lead
Built the studio's conversion practice from the ground up. Believes in the supremacy of clean event tracking and a tidy spreadsheet.
JW
Joyce Wong
Senior Designer
Spent four years inside a property portal before joining us. Sketches every wireframe by hand before opening Figma.
HZ
Haris Zafri
Senior Engineer
Headless commerce specialist. The team's unofficial keyboard reviewer and very official karaoke captain.
Inside the studio
What a week with us actually looks like.
Monday opens with a thirty minute studio standup over kopi from the place downstairs. Tuesday through Thursday is heads-down build time, sprinkled with client demos and a Wednesday lunch we shamelessly call "design court". Friday afternoons are reserved for retros, recipe swaps, and the occasional film screening when the projector cooperates.
Twice a month we run a public workshop in the studio — a deep dive on conversion design, headless commerce migrations, or whatever the team has been nerding out on. Tickets are free, the pastries are not.
Drop by the studio
Eleven years, measurable receipts.
140marketing sites, stores and portals shipped
91%of new work comes from referral or repeat
32%average lift on CRO retainers in year one
0cold-call sales pitches sent. Ever.