Hi, we're 628, a design and software studio with offices in Leicester and Huddersfield.
This is the bit of the site where an agency usually tells you it was "born from a shared passion for digital excellence". We'll spare you.
We started 628 for a much less romantic reason: we were sick of watching agencies take the piss.
What we kept seeing
Between us we'd been around this industry a long time. Luke came through frontend, UX, SEO and marketing, Kryspin through software architecture and infrastructure. Different ends of the same projects, same view of the industry.
And the pattern was hard to miss.
Businesses paying real money for a template with their logo dropped in. Corners cut where the client would never think to look. Work signed off as "done" that visibly wasn't. Support that evaporated the day the invoice cleared. Nobody picking up the phone six months later when the thing they'd been sold stopped doing its job.
The worst part was how normal it had become. Clients had been treated badly so consistently that they'd stopped expecting anything else. And a business that expects to be let down doesn't complain, it just quietly writes the money off.
Most of our clients aren't nervous because they don't know what they want. They're nervous because of what happened last time.
So we built the opposite
The whole point of 628 is to be the studio those businesses should have hired the first time.
That means a few specific things, and we're deliberate about all of them.
We're here to make you money. That's the actual job. Not to win an award, not to make our portfolio look good. To build something that earns its cost back and keeps earning. If a beautiful idea won't do that, it's the wrong idea.
No shortcuts. We build custom, properly, because most businesses aren't shaped like a template. Nothing bodged together from plugins and hoped over. The parts you'll never see get the same attention as the homepage.
We stay afterwards. Launch is the middle of a project, not the end. That's when the real information starts arriving. 88% of our clients carry on working with us long after launch, and that's the number we're proudest of, because it's the one you can't fake.
We're nice people. It shouldn't be a differentiator. In this industry it somehow is. You'll talk to the two of us, we'll tell you the truth even when it costs us the work, and nobody here is going to make you feel stupid for asking what something means.
What that looks like in practice
- You talk to the people doing the work. Both founders are hands-on.
- Design and development sit together from day one, so what gets designed is what gets built.
- We'll say no. If a project needs something we're not right for, you'll hear it early rather than late.
- We measure things instead of asserting them.
- If your budget doesn't fit, we'll tell you on the first call rather than waste your afternoon.
TableCloud is a decent example of the whole approach: brand, naming, UX and custom software, all from one team, built around how restaurants actually work rather than what was quickest to assemble.
The numbers we'll stand behind
55+ years of combined experience. 34+ projects launched: websites, software and brands, all built from scratch. Two offices, Leicester and Huddersfield, and a genuine preference for clients we can go and see.
And the name?
People ask, and the answer is gloriously unstrategic: Luke was born at 6:28am.
That's it. There was no workshop, no rationale deck, nobody explaining that the numerals represent our three pillars of synergy. Which feels about right. We'd rather put that energy into your brand than into mythologising our own.
If you've been burned before and you're wary, we get it. Say so, and we'll go at whatever pace makes that easier. Come and say hello. And if you'd rather see how we actually run a project first, the process is written up here.
