Q · about the studio The studio · est. 2021

Design, code, and the metric.

Qualia is a studio in Paris and Brooklyn that builds websites at the intersection of design, engineering, and marketing — for brands that want the site to do more than look right.

Section i — On the studio

We started Qualia in 2021 because most of the agencies we had worked at could draw a beautiful site, or build a fast one, or instrument a converting one — but rarely all three. The hand-off always lost something. Usually it was the metric.

So we built the studio on the opposite premise: design, engineering, and marketing in the same conversation, from the audit through the dashboards. The strategist sits with the engineer. The designer reads the analytics. The copywriter argues about button placement. That is the practice.

We work with founders, marketing leads, and growth teams who want a site that earns its place in the funnel — and who recognise that beauty and conversion are not opposites. They are the same problem, considered properly.

Section ii — The team

Design, engineering,
and growth
in one room.

The trio you meet in the first call is the trio you finish with. We bring in photographers, illustrators, and motion designers as the brief asks for it.

Founder · Design & Strategy

Quentin Côt

Twelve years between Paris design studios and Brooklyn engineering teams. Reads the analytics before the moodboard — and argues that the two are the same conversation.

Art Direction · Conversion

Élise Marchetti

Former art director at a French magazine you have read. Designs for the eye and for the click — and edits hardest the things that are pretty but do not earn their place on the page.

Engineering · Performance & SEO

Nikhil Sharma

Astro, edge runtimes, image pipelines, Core Web Vitals, structured data. Treats Lighthouse scores like a chef treats salt — quietly, but with conviction.

Section iii — Beliefs

The four
articles.

If we agree on these, we will probably agree on the work. We send them with every brief.

Article i

Conversion is the brief.

Every section, every button, every paragraph earns its place by what it does to the funnel. Pretty is the floor; performance is the work.

Article ii

Marketing-aware engineering.

SEO, analytics, A/B tests, lead capture, payment flows — wired in from the first sprint, not bolted on after launch.

Article iii

Performance compounds.

Page weight is a tax on revenue. We set a performance budget on day one and hold it to launch and beyond — because Core Web Vitals move rankings and rankings move revenue.

Article iv

Distinctive, with a purpose.

Standing out is a means, not an end. We design with character because indistinct sites get scrolled past — and a site that gets scrolled past cannot convert.

Section iv — Stack

The materials,
declared.

What every Qualia site runs on, by default. We choose for performance, longevity, and the dashboards the marketing team will actually look at.

Frontend Astro · TypeScript · plain CSS. Static-first, zero-JS by default, image pipeline tuned for the photographs the brand already owns.

Performance Core Web Vitals budget set on day one, held to every commit. Lighthouse 100s on launch. Edge-cached at Cloudflare for sub-50ms response globally.

SEO Semantic HTML, structured data, clean information architecture, sitemap and robots managed in code. Search Console connected from day one.

Analytics Plausible by default. GA4, server-side tagging, conversion APIs, and attribution when the funnel asks for it.

Experimentation Split-testing framework wired in at build time. Server-rendered, no flicker, primary and secondary metrics declared in code.

CMS, when needed Sanity, Notion, or hand-written TypeScript — chosen on the brief, never on habit.

Hosting Cloudflare Pages on the edge. No servers to babysit, no servers to bill you for.

A first conversation

Start the conversation.

Tell us the metric you would like to move. We will tell you what the site has to do to move it.

Write to the studio See selected work