Expertise
Digital Products & Platforms
Products vs. websites
The line between a website and a digital product is where the user can do something.
A website presents information. A product enables action: creating, customising, submitting, exploring, sharing. The distinction matters because the design and engineering challenges are fundamentally different.
Products have states. A website has pages. A product has flows, user inputs, conditional rendering, data persistence, error handling, and a dozen edge cases nobody anticipated until someone hit them in production.
Products also need to be maintained. The campaign ends, but the platform often lives on. The codebase needs to be readable. The architecture needs to be extensible. Documentation needs to exist.
At Merlin, we build digital products on a foundation that grows with the need.
Why custom matters
Off-the-shelf platforms have real value for certain use cases. But the projects that come to Merlin are typically the ones where an off-the-shelf solution either can't do what's needed, or produces an experience so generic it defeats the purpose.
When Converse needed a platform to create and explore predefined brand assets and motion, with the entire team working from a browser, there was no existing product that could do it. So we built nextStudio: a custom brand asset creation platform that gave their team the ability to produce multiple branded assets with motion, directly in the browser. No software to install. No design team bottleneck.
Campaign platforms
A campaign that runs once is a missed opportunity. The best campaign platforms are ones that brands can own, return to, and extend.
We've built campaign platforms that:
For Coca-Cola's Recycled Records campaign, we built a full marketing platform with a custom beatmaker, created in just five weeks. Users created beats using recordings from Sprite's recycling facilities, then exported and shared directly to socials. Interactive, branded, shareable. Shipped under six weeks.
Community and Web3-adjacent products
Digital products are increasingly about community, users interacting with each other around a shared experience.
Fandom is a project we're proud of for this reason. A community hub for Fandom, the world's first fan-owned music project, built for Musicow x Roc Nation. The platform gave fans early access to drops, updates, and exclusive experiences. It was a space where being a member meant something.
Building for community requires thinking differently about product architecture. Exclusivity, access tiers, real-time updates, and gated content all introduce complexity that a standard website doesn't have. We've navigated this complexity and built platforms that feel like membership.The most interesting digital products make people feel like they belong to something.
Our product architecture
We build on a modern, composable stack that prioritises performance, developer experience, and maintainability.
Next.js is our framework of choice. Server-side rendering and static generation mean products are fast by default. The App Router architecture makes large codebases manageable.
TypeScript throughout. Types prevent a class of bugs that would otherwise only surface in production.
Vercel for deployment, with preview environments on every pull request, automatic scaling, and edge distribution as standard.
Cloudflare for CDN, media optimisation, and rate limiting. Our 3D assets, video, and images pass through a Cloudflare pipeline that handles format conversion and global delivery automatically.
This stack gives us the ability to move fast while building something maintainable six months from now.
Headless CMS and content management
Most digital products need content management. We use DatoCMS and Contentful as our headless CMS platforms of choice. Both allow us to:
The headless approach means the CMS is a data layer. The presentation layer is entirely in our hands. No template constraints. No plugin conflicts.
For the Dior WebAR campaign, a headless CMS allowed the same experience to be deployed across 15 countries with region-specific content, legal copy, and language settings. Same codebase. Different content per locale. Managed without developer involvement after initial setup.
API integration and third-party systems
Real products connect to existing systems: analytics, payment providers, social platforms, identity services, e-commerce backends.
Some things we've integrated with:
Third-party integrations are where a lot of product projects slow down. APIs have quirks, rate limits, and documentation that doesn't match reality. We've navigated enough of them to move fast without getting stuck.
Digital Products & Platforms
Digital products, SaaS, are where craft meets engineering at its most demanding. At Merlin, we build platforms that agencies and brands can actually own, fast to ship, clean to maintain, and built to grow.
A quick TLDR; for the scanners:
