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The Studio · No. 01

Two founders. Every project. No layers in between.

2D2C was founded in 2017 by Maya Okafor and Daniel Vasquez — a design director and an engineering lead who had spent a decade inside IDEO and Frog watching great work get diluted by staffing models that optimized for utilization, not for the work. They started the studio on a single rule: the people who pitch the work are the people who ship it. Seven years and 142 products later, that rule still runs the company.

Maya Okafor, co-founder and design principal, photographed in the Brooklyn studio.
Maya Okafor · Co-founder, Design Principal · Brooklyn, 2024
Maya Okafor

Design runs the room. The partner runs the room the design is in.

Former Design Director, IDEO Cambridge (2011–2017). Led the consumer practice across health, finance, and mobility. Before IDEO: five years at Pentagram New York. Teaches a senior thesis studio at RISD each spring.

"I've watched too many good briefs die in translation between a strategy deck and a junior's first Figma file. Our rule is simple — if a partner can't credibly defend every wireframe to a CEO, they don't lead the engagement. We don't staff around risk; we staff around craft."

  • 142 products shipped since founding
  • 11 Awwwards Site of the Day
  • RISD senior thesis advisor, 2019–present
  • 4 Fast Company Innovation by Design honorees
Daniel Vasquez

Engineering leadership should look like product leadership — calm, present, on the call.

Former Director of Engineering, Frog Design San Francisco (2012–2017). Built the studio's first dedicated full-stack practice inside Frog's West Coast operation. Before Frog: staff engineer at Stripe and an early platform role at Square. Speaks at Config and JSConf; quietly maintains two open-source libraries.

"I have never understood why a studio sells you a principal and ships you a team of three. Either the partner is doing the work, or the partner is selling you a fiction. We don't separate those jobs — Maya and I sit in every weekly review, every architecture review, and every launch retro. We are the bench."

  • 9.3 week average time-to-launch
  • 87% ship within 5% of original estimate
  • Stripe alum · 2010–2012
  • JSConf speaker · 2018, 2021, 2023
Daniel Vasquez, co-founder and engineering principal, photographed in the Brooklyn studio.
Daniel Vasquez · Co-founder, Engineering Principal · Brooklyn, 2024
Founded 2017 · Brooklyn, NY · 28 full-time · 14 specialists on the bench See what they've shipped
Hiring Philosophy · No. 02

A senior-only studio is a more expensive studio to run. It is also the only studio worth running.

2D2C does not employ juniors. We do not run an offshore engineering pod. We do not employ account managers, project managers, or producers who sit between you and the people drawing the work. Every person you meet on a scoping call is a person who will be on your project, billed at the same rate, with the same title.

This costs us. Our bench turnover is deliberately low (we promoted our first internal hire, a senior product designer, in 2019 and she is still here). Our bill rate is not the lowest you will receive. Our capacity is finite — we turn down roughly one in three qualified briefs because we will not over-commit the calendar of a team we refuse to staff with replacements.

What it saves you is the thing the brief actually costs: the coordination tax. A typical 12-week engagement at 2D2C involves one point of contact (a founding partner), one roadmap (shared, public, versioned), one invoice (a single line item per week), and one weekly review (45 minutes, recorded, with the partner present). You stop running vendor status meetings. You start shipping.

We have one hiring bar. It is the same bar Maya and Daniel would clear today. A candidate has to be able to lead a client call on day three, defend their work in a room of executives on day ten, and ship production code or final comps on day twenty. We hire between three and six people a year. The current team is 28 full-time and a curated bench of 14 specialists we have worked with for more than three years.

If you are vetting us, ask us who will be on your project by name, by week, and by hour. We will answer in writing before week one.

28 Full-time employees
14 Senior specialists on the bench
0 Junior designers · offshore pods · account managers
9.3 Average weeks to launch, 142 products
The Bench · No. 03

Six disciplines. Forty-two people. One roster you can read like a table of contents.

We organize the studio around six practices, not around titles. Every project draws a four-to-six person crew that includes at least one member from each of the first four practices below. The last two — Strategy and Ops — are how the work stays on schedule and on brief. Counts reflect headcount as of November 2024.

i. 9 people

Product Design

Senior product designers and a design systems lead. Responsible for IA, interaction, and the visual layer. Each has shipped at least three flagship products at a previous studio or in-house role.

Lineage — IDEO (3), Frog (2), Apple Human Interface (1), independent practices (3)

ii. 8 people

Engineering

Full-stack TypeScript and Go engineers, a platform lead, and an iOS specialist. Ships to Vercel, AWS, or your VPC. No handoffs to an external team — engineers stay on through launch.

Lineage — Stripe (2), Square (1), Vercel (1), Shopify (1), independent (3)

iii. 4 people

Research

A senior researcher, two associate researchers, and a quant. Every engagement begins with 8–12 customer interviews and a quantified JTBD map before a single wireframe is drawn.

Lineage — frog Milan research practice (2), ReD Associates (1), Bank of America CX (1)

iv. 5 people

Brand

A brand director, two designers, a type lead, and a motion designer. Owns naming, identity systems, and the editorial layer that surrounds the product surface.

Lineage — Pentagram (2), Collins (1), Wieden+Kennedy brand design (1), independent (1)

v. 5 people

Strategy

Product strategy, go-to-market, and pricing. Two former founders, a former a16z operating partner, an ex-McKinsey principal, and Maya herself on every engagement.

Lineage — a16z (1), McKinsey Digital (1), two-time founders (2), IDEO (1)

vi. 5 people

Studio Operations

Studio manager, two producer-operators, finance lead, and a writer-editor who runs our case study library and the Shipped podcast. The reason your invoice is one line item.

Lineage — ex-producer at Instrument, ex-editor at It's Nice That, ex-CFO at a Series-B fintech

Headcount totals 42: 28 full-time employees on payroll, plus a curated bench of 14 senior specialists we have collaborated with on multiple engagements since 2020. The bench is paid the same rate regardless of project status — we do not churn freelancers for utilization.

Read how a crew assembles for your project
Where we stand · No. 04

A candid note on representation, hiring, and supplier diversity.

Heads of Design vetting a new MSA increasingly screen for this. We would rather put our commitments on the record than leave them in a deck.

On the team we have built

Of the 28 full-time employees as of November 2024, 19 identify as women, non-binary, or gender-nonconforming. 14 of 28 identify as Black, Latinx, Asian, Middle Eastern, or multiracial. Our leadership team — partner level and practice leads — is 60% women and 60% people of color. Maya is a Black woman; Daniel is a first-generation Mexican-American.

We have published internal pay bands by level and discipline since 2021, and we run a salary review every January against external benchmarks (Pave and Pave Connect). Our median pay for women is 99.4% of the median for men at equivalent level. We are not yet where we want to be on that last decimal; the gap is concentrated in two long-tenured engineering hires and is being closed in the 2025 cycle.

On who we hire and how

Every role at 2D2C is posted publicly with a named hiring manager and a transparent process. We do not use referrals as a primary sourcing channel. We work with three recruiting partners — one Black-owned, one Latina-owned, and one AAPI-owned — on a rotating basis, and we publish their names on our careers page. We do not work with agencies that present candidate slates that are not themselves diverse.

We have hired 14 people since 2022. 11 of those hires came through a non-referral pipeline. We sponsor one HBCU design internship each summer through a partnership with Pratt and the Cooper Hewitt curriculum lab. Three of our current full-time designers came through that pipeline.

On supplier diversity and spend

34% of our 2024 vendor spend — research recruitment, photography, copy, illustration, motion — went to certified minority-owned or women-owned businesses. We track this quarterly and report it to every client that asks. If your procurement team needs the data formatted for an MSDA report, our studio manager will return it within five business days.

We do not treat this as a marketing claim. It is a procurement claim, and it is auditable.

On what we still have to fix

We have one Black engineer on a team of eight. We have zero engineering hires from a community college or coding bootcamp pathway in the last three years. Our retention rate is strong, but our pipeline is not as wide as our hiring partners would like. We are commissioning an external DEI audit in Q1 2025 and will publish the findings, including the gaps.

If you have a vetted engineering fellowship or a non-traditional talent pipeline, we want to know about it. Email our studio manager, Renata Castillo, at [email protected].

The next step · No. 05

Come sit in our studio for thirty minutes. We'll sketch the roadmap on the wall.

A scoping call with Maya or Daniel. No deck, no discovery phase, no sales tax. Bring a brief, a whiteboard, and a hard question. We'll come back with a fixed-scope proposal within five business days — written, priced, and dated.

Book a scoping call Or read three case studies first
Studio 68 Jay Street, Suite 415 · Brooklyn, NY 11201
Direct line [email protected]
Response time One partner, within one business day