What is Butter? Design and strategy, on subscription.

We’re a design studio, but not the kind you’re thinking of

When most people hear "design agency," they picture a pitch deck full of case studies, a three-month onboarding process, and an account manager who relays your feedback to someone you’ll never meet.

That’s not us.

Butter is Airi and Dom: two co-founders with 10+ years of experience each, working directly with you. Airi leads product strategy, user research, and how your product actually makes sense for the people using it. Dom handles creative direction, visual design, and making sure what you ship looks like it belongs at the top of your market.

No junior designers learning on your project. No account managers in the middle. You get us.

How it actually works

You subscribe. You send us work. We deliver.

Once you’re on a plan, you submit design requests through a shared board. Think of it like a queue: with one active request at a time, turned around fast, allowing you to ask for revisions until it’s right. No lengthy briefs, no SOWs, no "we’ll need to scope this separately."

For most requests, you’ll hear back within a couple of days. For bigger strategy work, we’ll set up a session together.

You can pause or cancel anytime. We don’t lock you in because we’d rather provide you with the work you need, when you need it.

What we actually do

We cover two broad areas: strategy and design. In practice, that means we can help you with:

• Product and design strategy: figuring out what to build, for whom, how to scale, and why before spending a cent on execution

• UX and app design: the flows, wireframes, and interfaces people actually use

• Web design: from landing pages, single design elements, to full product sites, including Framer development

• Branding: visual identity, systems, and assets that hold together across channels

• User research: talking to your users so you’re not designing based on assumptions. Building through real data.

• Localization: designing for different languages and markets, not just translating text (we’re native English, German, Japanese, and Mandarin speakers)

Of course, you don’t need all of this at once. Most clients start with one or two areas and expand as they need to.

Why subscription, not project-based?

The honest answer: because projects create the wrong incentives.

On a project, an agency’s goal is to close the fixed requirements and get paid. Scope creep becomes a billing conversation. Revisions become negotiation. The relationship turns transactional right when you need it to be collaborative.

With a subscription, we’re on the same side. If your priorities shift (and they will) we shift with you. If something isn’t working, we talk about it and fix it. The way we work is more like an embedded team than a vendor.

A subscription also means predictable costs. You know exactly what you’re paying each month. No surprise invoices.

Who we’re a good fit for

Butter works best for early-stage founders who need premium design and strategy without the overhead of hiring in-house, or growing SaaS teams who require senior design thinking on tap without having to surrender to a large agency.

You’ll get the most out of us if you can point us at a problem and trust us to help solve it. We’re collaborators, not order-takers, so the best working relationships are ones where there’s genuine back-and-forth, not just a request queue.

Who we’re probably not right for

If you need a 20-person team, a full-time embedded resource, or someone to manage a large production pipeline , then maybe we’re not the right fit for you. We’re small by design. That’s what keeps us good.

The short version

Butter is two senior designers — one focused on strategy, one on design — available to you on a flat monthly subscription. Fast turnaround, no contracts, no surprises. Work with us directly, from day one.

If that sounds like what you’ve been looking for, start here →