# Displace Agency - full content export > Engineering studio building custom web platforms on Next.js, Supabase, and TypeScript. Based in Madrid and Miami. Every engagement ships with source code ownership, self-service editing, and 12 weeks of weekly performance reports. Founder: Santiago Lobo van Wersch Contact: hello@displace.agency ยท https://cal.com/displace/30-min-meeting --- ## Work (20 projects) ### Draper Associates URL: https://displace.agency/finder/draper-associates Live: https://draper.vc Category: Venture Capital Firm Industry: Venture Capital Location: San Mateo, CA Timeline: 6 weeks Year: 2024 Draper Associates is an early-stage venture capital firm founded by Tim Draper. The website needed to explain what the firm invests in, show decades of portfolio companies, and make it easy for founders to pitch. The Offsite Agency led the visual design. Displace built the website and the systems behind it. Founders can explore the firm's focus areas, search the portfolio, submit a pitch, and use the AI Pitch Coach before sending it. The Draper team can manage companies and publish stories without rebuilding pages. Displace also supports analytics, SEO, and ongoing improvements. ### The Offsite Agency URL: https://displace.agency/finder/the-offsite-agency Live: https://theoffsiteagency.com Category: Creative Design Studio Industry: Design Studio Location: Remote Timeline: 4 weeks Year: 2024 The Offsite Agency is a branding and design studio for premium brands and manufacturers. They designed their own website. Displace built it and supports the digital systems behind our shared work. Visitors can browse projects, understand the Brand, Digital, and Systems services, and book a call. The site gives The Offsite Agency a flexible platform for publishing new work as the studio grows. ### Kestrel Intelligence URL: https://displace.agency/finder/kestrel-intelligence Live: https://kestrelintelligence.com Category: Defense Technology Industry: Autonomy & Intelligence Location: United States Timeline: 8 weeks Year: 2026 Kestrel builds autonomous sensing systems for military and intelligence teams. The website needed to explain a technical product, publish research, recruit specialists, and capture serious enquiries. Displace built the site and the publishing and lead systems behind it. The Kestrel team can publish whitepapers and articles through Payload CMS. Visitors can understand the product, download research, contact the company, and apply for access. HubSpot and Resend route each enquiry. ### Villa Tulua URL: https://displace.agency/finder/villa-tulua Live: https://villatulua.com Category: Luxury Hospitality Industry: Hospitality Location: Marbella, Spain Timeline: 1 week Year: 2026 Villa Tulua is a five-bedroom private villa in Nueva Andalucia, Marbella. The project needed a brand and booking request channel that the family owns, while the property manager continues to run the stay. Displace built the identity, multilingual website, live availability, and enquiry system. Guests can explore the villa, photos, and local area, check live availability, and send a booking request in English, Arabic, Spanish, or German. The property manager remains in charge of reservations while Villa Tulua owns its brand, domain, analytics, and enquiry experience. ### Forma Strata URL: https://displace.agency/finder/forma-strata Live: https://formastrata.co Category: Luxury Rugs & Furniture Industry: Luxury E-commerce Location: London, UK Timeline: 6 weeks Year: 2025 Forma Strata sells handcrafted rugs and one-of-one vintage furniture. The business needed more than a Shopify theme: a storefront that felt like the brand, explained the products, and supported several ways to buy. Displace built a custom storefront with Shopify behind it. The team still manages products, stock, orders, and checkout in Shopify. Public customers can shop the collection. Trade buyers can apply, sign in, and see their pricing. Made-to-order customers can configure a rug and request a quote. Campaign pages, presale access, and email capture use the same product catalog and the same brand system. ### KURA URL: https://displace.agency/finder/kura Live: https://itskura.com Category: Multi-brand Commerce Network Industry: Luxury E-commerce Location: Internal - Displace Agency Timeline: 6 months (ongoing) Year: 2026 KURA is Displace's own shopping and discovery platform. It brings products from independent Shopify stores into one curated catalog. Each shop keeps control of its products, prices, stock, checkout, and customer relationship. People can browse products by category, material, color, size, and store. KURA keeps product and stock data in sync, then sends each purchase to the original shop. An invitation and onboarding system lets new Shopify stores join without a manual rebuild. ### Movo URL: https://displace.agency/finder/movo Live: https://movo-live.vercel.app Category: B2B Furniture Commerce Industry: B2B / Office Furniture Location: Croatia Timeline: Feb-Apr 2026 Year: 2026 Movo makes desks and workspace furniture for schools, studios and offices. The Offsite Agency led the brand strategy and photography. Displace built a headless Shopify storefront with a 3D product viewer, so professional buyers can inspect the real model before ordering. The new storefront is built and launch waits on the DNS cutover. Visitors can browse the collection, rotate real 3D models of the furniture, and reach a dedicated page built for architects, dealers and other professional buyers. Shopify manages products, stock and checkout behind the custom storefront. ### Parure London URL: https://displace.agency/finder/parure-london Live: https://www.parurelondon.com Category: Jewellery DTC Industry: Jewellery / E-commerce Location: London, UK Timeline: 4 weeks Year: 2026 Parure London reinterprets the historic parure, a matched set of jewels, as a modern celebration of individual style. Displace built a headless Next.js storefront on Shopify, migrated from a page builder plugin, with weekly performance reports. Visitors can browse the collection by category, explore past collections in the archive, and check out through Shopify. The storefront replaced a page builder site while keeping the same product catalog and checkout flow, with weekly reports on performance and traffic. ### Space Heritage URL: https://displace.agency/finder/space-heritage Live: https://spaceheritage.displace.agency Category: Editorial Archive Industry: Space Heritage Location: Europe Timeline: Ongoing Year: 2026 Space Heritage is an independent archive of the vehicles that took us off the planet. Displace built a structured home for spacecraft specifications, photography, engineers, collections, and editorial writing. It covers launch vehicles, crewed capsules, space stations, probes, satellites, and landers, from Sputnik to Starship. It is an archive, not a shop. Every vehicle can be reached by category, era, country, space agency, or engineer, and filtering happens instantly in the browser. Each vehicle page brings verified specifications, a photo gallery, and historical context together in one place. The content system lets the archive grow without redesigning the site. ### Auto Heritage URL: https://displace.agency/finder/auto-heritage Live: https://autoheritage.displace.agency Category: Editorial Archive Industry: Automotive Heritage Location: Europe Timeline: Ongoing Year: 2026 Auto Heritage is an independent archive of significant European cars. Displace built a structured home for vehicle specifications, photography, designers, collections, and editorial stories. It is an archive, not a marketplace. Visitors can browse by brand, era, designer, and collection, or search for a specific car. Each vehicle page brings verified specifications, images, and context together. The content system lets the archive expand without redesigning the site. ### TodoWeekend URL: https://displace.agency/finder/todoweekend Live: https://todoweekend.com Category: Consumer Product Industry: Local Discovery Location: 9 city editions Timeline: 6 weeks Year: 2026 TodoWeekend helps people decide what to do this weekend. It brings concerts, exhibitions, festivals, and other events onto one live map for each city, then ranks the events that matter now. Visitors can choose a city, explore the map, search events, and build a weekend plan. The same data and publishing system powers every edition, while regular imports keep each city current. ### TodoWeekend App URL: https://displace.agency/finder/todoweekend-app Live: https://todoweekend.com Category: iOS App Industry: Local Discovery Location: Live city network Timeline: Native rebuild Year: 2026 The TodoWeekend iPhone app uses the same live events as the website in a native map experience. People can switch cities, tap a pin, read the event details, and save plans for later. The app combines a MapKit map, city switching, event sheets, bookmarks, and account sync. The city list and event data come from the shared TodoWeekend system, so the app stays current as the network changes. ### SearchVinyl URL: https://displace.agency/finder/searchvinyl Live: https://searchvinyl.com Category: Music Discovery Platform Industry: Consumer Web App Location: Madrid + Miami Timeline: Product build Year: 2026 SearchVinyl is Displace's playable record collection. It keeps the feeling of browsing physical shelves, then adds search, filters, saved records, track lists, and short music previews. Visitors can search albums and songs, filter by genre or decade, save records, and drop the needle on an Apple preview. The collection holds 399 records across 8 decades and 18 genres, with a page for every album. ### Driveway Paradise URL: https://displace.agency/finder/driveway-paradise Live: https://drivewayparadise.com Category: Sportswear DTC Industry: Sportswear / E-commerce Location: Los Angeles, CA Timeline: 8 weeks Year: 2025 Driveway Paradise makes sportswear for the regular athlete. The Offsite Agency led the brand and visual design. Displace built a custom storefront with Shopify behind it, then stayed on to improve the shopping experience and measurement. Customers can shop by sport and collection, build a match kit, use discounts, and move through a cart that stays with them across the site. Shopify still manages products, stock, orders, and checkout. Analytics connects the storefront to the Shopify checkout. ### Driveway Paradise App URL: https://displace.agency/finder/driveway-paradise-app Live: https://drivewayparadise.com Category: Mobile App Rebuild Industry: Sports & Community Location: Miami, FL Timeline: In development Year: 2026 Driveway Paradise connects people through local pickup sports. Displace is rebuilding the mobile app from the ground up while keeping the existing Supabase data and App Store listing. Players can find games on a map, join or host, manage recurring events, chat with the group, add friends, and receive useful notifications. The rebuild is still in development and will replace the current app when the launch checks are complete. ### SOMA URL: https://displace.agency/finder/soma Live: https://soma-headless.vercel.app Category: Concept Store (Demo) Industry: Health & Wellness Location: New York, NY Timeline: 5 weeks Year: 2024 SOMA is a concept store created to show a complete headless shopping experience for a cognitive-wellness brand. It is a working prototype, not a maintained client shop. Visitors can browse products, open detailed product pages, use a cart and account flow, and read editorial content. The project shows how a custom storefront can combine brand storytelling with normal commerce features. ### Vimcar URL: https://displace.agency/finder/vimcar Live: https://vimcar.de Category: Fleet Tech Industry: SaaS / Fleet Tech Location: Berlin, Germany Timeline: 2022-2025 Year: 2024 Before Displace, Santiago worked in-house at Vimcar from 2022 to 2025. The work included marketing pages, reusable components, and the design system used across the fleet-management website. This is prior in-house experience, not a Displace client project. The component library helped different teams build pages with the same patterns and visual rules. The examples shown here are selected pages created within that shared system. ### VyB Capital URL: https://displace.agency/finder/vyb-capital Live: https://vyb.displace.agency Category: Financial Services Industry: Investment / Finance Location: Santiago, Chile Timeline: 5 weeks Year: 2026 VyB Capital is a Chilean independent family office. The founders often present the firm from their phones during meetings, so the website was planned for mobile first. The Offsite Agency led the visual design. Displace built the site and its inline editing system. Visitors can understand VyB's approach, team, and services, then contact the firm directly. The team can edit around 80 content fields from the website without asking a developer or waiting for a new deployment. ### Nova Nexus Capital URL: https://displace.agency/finder/nova-nexus Live: https://novanexuscapital.com Category: Fintech Platform Industry: Financial Technology Location: Chile Timeline: Ongoing retainer Year: 2026 Nova Nexus Capital brings financial and regulatory technology into Chilean banks and other strategic industries. The Offsite Agency led the visual identity. Displace built the Spanish-language website, inline content editor, contact flow, and measurement system. The team can edit text, images, sections, and downloadable resources directly on the website. Visitors can understand each technology partner, explore industry use cases, and contact Nova Nexus. Displace provides support and weekly analytics. ### Displace Agency URL: https://displace.agency/finder/displace-v3 Live: https://displace.agency Category: Agency Website Industry: Design & Engineering Location: Madrid + Miami Timeline: Ongoing Year: 2026 Displace OS is our website and our product demo. Instead of presenting the agency through a normal set of pages, we built a working desktop where each app represents a real part of the business. Finder holds client projects. The App Store contains free tools and working demos. Notes explains the agency, services, fit, and pricing. Mail and Calendar accept real enquiries and bookings. On phones, the same content becomes a native-style app grid. --- ## Journal (full articles) ### What Is Headless Shopify, and When Is It Worth Building? URL: https://displace.agency/journal/headless-shopify-vs-shopify-themes-when-to-choose Published: 2026-07-16 Author: Santiago Lobo A plain guide to what headless Shopify changes, what stays in Shopify, when a theme is better, and what a real custom storefront can support. Headless Shopify is a custom storefront with Shopify behind it. Customers use a website built around the brand and the way it sells. Your team still uses Shopify for products, stock, orders and checkout. > The simple test: if Shopify runs the business well but its theme limits what customers can see or do, headless may be worth building. #### What changes, and what stays in Shopify A standard Shopify theme uses Shopify's own page and theme system for the customer facing website. A headless build replaces that layer with custom code. Shopify remains the commerce engine behind it. Payments do not move into a risky custom system. Checkout, tax, shipping and order management stay with Shopify. The custom work is the storefront customers use before checkout. #### Why a brand would build it - The product needs more explanation, storytelling or interaction than a normal theme gives it. - The brand needs tight control over how the storefront looks and behaves. - Retail, trade, custom orders, presales or other audiences need different paths through one catalog. - The website must connect Shopify to other systems without feeling like a collection of separate apps. - The storefront needs room to change as the business grows. #### A real example: Forma Strata Forma Strata sells vintage objects and made to order rugs. A normal product grid was not enough. The same storefront needed to support public shopping, trade buyers, one of one pieces, custom rug requests and campaign launches without breaking the brand into separate websites. We built the storefront in React and connected it to Shopify through the Storefront API. Shopify still holds the catalog, inventory, orders and checkout. The website controls how customers discover products, understand them and move between each buying path. Custom rugs use a guided request flow instead of pretending every order belongs in a simple add to cart button. Trade customers can apply, sign in and shop through their own account experience. Campaign and presale pages use the same products and the same visual system. #### When a Shopify theme is the better choice Headless is not the premium answer to every Shopify project. A strong theme is often the smarter choice when the business has a familiar catalog, a normal path to checkout and a team that wants to make most website changes inside Shopify. - Choose a theme when speed and a focused budget matter more than a custom system. - Choose a theme when Shopify's normal product, collection and checkout flow already fits the business. - Choose a theme when the team needs broad control without regular developer support. - Do not choose headless only because it sounds more advanced. #### Cost, timing and ownership Displace Shopify storefronts start at $15,000. Headless Shopify builds start at $22,000. The final price depends on the catalog, content, languages, integrations and special buying flows. Forma Strata's first build took six weeks. Larger catalogs and deeper integrations need more time. Custom code also needs care. Some Shopify apps require a custom integration. Changes outside the editing controls we build may need a developer. We hand over the code after full payment, document the system and can provide ongoing care from $2,250 per month. #### The decision > If the hard part is visual polish, keep Shopify and build a better theme. If the business needs a storefront that a theme cannot express cleanly, build headless. The right choice is the simpler system that supports how the business actually sells. We can review the catalog, the buying paths and the team's editing needs before recommending either one. --- ### Security Is a Feature URL: https://displace.agency/journal/security-is-a-feature Published: 2026-06-17 Author: Santiago Lobo AI tools made the web cheaper to attack and more expensive to run. Here is how we keep client sites fast, safe, and unbothered by the bots quietly running up the bill. Open your analytics and a flattering story stares back: every line looks like a person who chose to visit you. Most of them are not. A large and growing share of the traffic hitting any modern website is automated. Scrapers, vulnerability scanners, price bots, and a new generation of AI crawlers that copy everything they can reach. Most never buy a thing. Some are quietly checking whether your front door is locked. The AI boom pushed this both ways at once. It handed everyone cheap tools to probe and scrape at scale, and it created a bottomless hunger for content to feed models. The web is now cheaper to attack and more expensive to run. We build for both, on every site we ship. > Security is not something you sprinkle on at the end. It is a property of how the thing was built. We treat it like speed: designed in, never bolted on. #### The bill is the new attack Here is the part nobody warns you about: you do not have to be hacked to get hurt. Modern sites run on metered infrastructure, where every request, every image, and every function that wakes up carries a price. Point a hungry crawler at an unprotected site and it will cheerfully run the bill somewhere you never budgeted for, while your real visitors notice nothing. So we are strict about resources. We cache hard, so one page is not rebuilt a thousand times for a thousand bots. We serve right-sized modern images, so nobody drains a month of bandwidth hammering a folder of heavy files. We throttle the endpoints that actually cost money, like forms and search. A bad actor should hit a wall long before it hits your invoice. #### Block the parasites, keep the guests The lazy way to stop scrapers is to slam the door on anything without a mouse and a heartbeat. That also slams the door on Google, on the AI assistants that now recommend businesses to real people, and sometimes on your own customers. We do not do lazy. Instead we separate the traffic we want from the traffic we do not. Search engines and the AI tools that send real visitors get a clean, fast, fully readable site, because being found is the entire point. The extractive bots that take everything and give nothing back meet rate limits and quiet dead ends, at the edge, before a page is ever built. The defense stays invisible and costs your real visitors exactly zero milliseconds. > A scraper should never know it lost. The page just gets slow, then boring, then gone. The human reading this never feels a thing. #### We wrote ourselves a playbook None of this should be improvised project by project, so we wrote it down. A security playbook we run on every build: the headers that lock a site down, the rules that keep secrets out of the browser, the database policies that assume the worst, and the bot defenses above. It turns security from something we hope we remembered into something the site simply is. Most of it you will never see, which is exactly the point. A safe website does not look safe. It looks fast, it works, and it quietly refuses to become someone else's free lunch. That is the job. Lately, it is most of the job. --- ### How Clients Edit a Custom Displace Website URL: https://displace.agency/journal/the-displace-editing-experience Published: 2026-04-05 Author: Santiago Lobo Two editing options for custom websites: an inline editor with guardrails, or a guided code workflow for technical teams. #### Why We Moved Beyond Webflow Webflow was our default for years: fast to build, clients could edit, the best CMS in no code. We shipped a long line of projects on it and kept hitting the same wall: design constraints, performance ceilings, integration friction, per seat pricing that punishes growth, and a content model that cracks the moment a client wants real structure. Then the math changed. AI-assisted development made custom builds faster, and an inline editing pattern gave some clients control without a traditional admin panel. Today we choose the stack and editing method around the project. Some clients get an inline editor, some use a guided code workflow, and some need a standard CMS. #### Two Editing Options We Use #### Option A: Inline CMS with Boundary Conditions When this option is included, the client logs in and edits approved content on the live site. Text becomes a field, images open a picker and links become inputs. The editing surface stays simple because the design rules remain locked. The important part is what it refuses to do. Every editable field is typed, constrained and validated against the design system: you cannot break the grid, drift off palette, or ship a hero image at the wrong ratio. Editing freedom inside hard walls. - Double click any text, image or link to edit in place - Changes preview live before publishing - Boundary conditions prevent layout and brand drift - Versioned content: one click rollback - One shared component library across all pages - No separate admin UI to learn or maintain #### Option B: Cursor with Boundary Prompts For technical teams we configure Cursor or Claude Code with boundary prompts: guardrail files that name the design tokens, the components to reuse, and the things that must never change. 'Add a blog post about our latest certification' lands in the same file structure, the same patterns and the same typography as the rest of the site. No drift. This is how we maintain the Displace site. We only hand this workflow over when the client team is comfortable working with code and the responsibility is clear. ```markdown # CLAUDE.md for ## Design system - Only use tokens from tailwind.config.ts - Primary accent: #f3350c - Never use rounded-full except for avatars - All cards: 6px radius + hairline border ## Components - Hero variants live in components/hero/* - Reuse ProjectCard for any project tile - Blog posts: use ArticleBlocks renderer ## Guardrails - Never add new tailwind colors - Never inline styles - Never create new fonts - Always run typecheck before suggesting commit ``` #### Optional Workflows After Launch When useful, we can configure workflows for recurring jobs such as publishing, reporting or image preparation. The exact list belongs in the project scope. It is not a default promise attached to every website. - Content Publisher: posts and announcements, schema and sitemap handled - Page Builder: new pages inside the design system - SEO Optimizer: meta, structured data and internal links, fed by Search Console - Analytics Reporter: GA4 and Search Console in a weekly format - Impact Study Creator: case studies from a structured input - Product Page Updater: new features without touching layout - Image Optimizer: web ready batches, Core Web Vitals safe - Deploy and Monitor: preview, ship and verify with one command #### Support After Launch After launch, we train the team on the agreed editing method and stay available through ongoing care when useful. Ongoing care starts at $2,250 per month and is scoped separately. There is no automatic twelve-week program attached to every build. > Want to see both modes on a real project? Book a 30 minute call and we will walk you through a live demo. ---