A New Chapter for Hekla (and Why It’s Taken Us This Long to Say It Out Loud)

We’ve officially launched the new Hekla site, and with it, we’re making something official that’s been true for a while:

Hekla is now a partnership.

Colin Eldridge and I have been collaborating across projects for years, but we’ve finally given that collaboration a proper home, a clearer direction, and most importantly, a shared plan for what we’re building next.

If you’ve worked with either of us before, this probably won’t come as a surprise. If you haven’t, hello. 👋🏻

Before Hekla Was a “Studio”, It Was Already a Partnership

Colin and I met the way a lot of good creative partnerships start: through a referral and a slightly chaotic moment when he needed a dependable developer yesterday.

We worked together once, then twice, then suddenly we had a rhythm and were no longer building one-off assets, but systems to scale content marketing initiatives for enterprise-level brands.

Not just “get the thing built,” but:

• clarify the problem before solving it

• make decisions that survive beyond launch

• keep things tidy, fast, and scalable

• collaborate like we’re on the same team (because we are)

Colin’s a producer who cares about the build, not just the deliverable. That’s rarer than it should be and it’s why this partnership makes sense: we’ve both always worked best when the strategy and the implementation aren’t at war with each other.

The Skyword Years: Where the Collaboration Muscle Got Built

A big part of my work over the years has been collaborating with creative teams delivering interactive web projects at pace. One of the most formative environments for that was Skyword. Colin would liaise between client, copywriter, designer and myself, orchestrating a team of creatives married to a singular vision documented in living, breathing creative brief.

If you’ve ever built interactive content for big brands, you’ll know the drill: multiple time zones, stakeholders, deliverables and not much room for flexibility.

That work taught us how to operate as a calm, reliable extension of a broader team, foreseeing (then alleviating) potential road blocks, up-leveling content within scope (and without slowing things down) and ultimately bringing structure to complexity at scale.

It’s also where we learned that “collaboration” isn’t a vibe, it’s a workflow.

Hekla’s Evolution: From WordPress and Maintenance to Composable Builds

Hekla has always been about quality and longevity. But the technical shape of that has shifted over time.

For years, I’ve built a lot of WordPress sites, maintained them, hosted them, rescued them when they broke, and tried to keep them fast and stable while they slowly accumulated… everything. (Plugins. Editors. Page builders. Mystery scripts. The usual.)

At the same time, I’ve been leaning more and more into modern front-end development. React stopped being “the scary thing,” and became the thing I genuinely enjoy building in. The developer experience is better, the outcomes are cleaner, and the performance ceiling is much higher.

So the new Hekla reflects what we’re actually focused on now:

• Bespoke, headless builds (Next.js, composable architecture, flexible content models)

• Shopify development for growing brands (clean themes, scalable components, thoughtful structure)

• Long-term maintenance and hosting partnerships (the boring stuff that makes everything work)

• Collaborative development for creative teams (agency workflows, white-label support, being the dev partner you don’t have to babysit)

We’re still the same partner behind the scenes, just more intentional, and a lot more aligned.

Amsterdam, Late 2025: The “Right, We Should Probably Make This Official” Moment

Colin and I finally met in person late in 2025 in Amsterdam at Storyblok’s JoyConf, which felt like a very fitting place to have the “okay, this is the direction” conversation. A room full of people building component-led websites with modern tooling tends to do that. It’s hard not to come away thinking: yes, this is where things are going.

We were already building in this direction, but at the time it still felt like something off in the distance we’d eventually work up to. Being there in-person, together, made us realize that if we’re not actively positioning ourselves at the bleeding edge, we’re already behind the curve. We knew we needed to re-tool everything we’d built so far to capture this.

So we did.

What This Means in Practice

If you work with Hekla, here’s what you should expect:

• We’ll ask questions early, so projects don’t unravel late

• We’ll build re-usable components and systems, not fragile one-offs

• We’ll care about performance, accessibility, and maintainability (because future-you deserves a break)

• We’ll fill in any personnel gaps the project has from our extended network of elite creatives

• We’ll collaborate properly with designers, strategists, and marketing teams

Hekla sits in the gap between big agencies and solo freelancers: all the technical skill, none of the bloat.

Small team. Serious output.

Who We’re Building This For

We’re especially excited to work more closely with:

• Creative agencies and marketers who need modern, strategic dev support

• Shopify brands who want thoughtful structure and scalability

• Teams ready to move beyond WordPress and page builders (or at least stop fighting them daily)

If you’ve been burned by flaky dev support, or you’re trying to ship something modern without turning it into a science project, we can help.

A Quick Thank You (and an Invitation)

If you’ve worked with me before, thank you. If you’ve worked with Colin before, thank you. And if you’ve worked with us together, you already know what this partnership looks like in practice.

If you’re a creative agency, marketer, or eCommerce brand looking for a dev partner who plugs in seamlessly and builds things that last, let’s talk.

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Quiet partner. Loud results.