02 About

Made for small teams aiming higher.

Observatory is a one-founder studio with the shape of a small team. Web, brand, photography and the partnership that comes after launch, for ambitious businesses that need to look and act like they’re already much bigger.

What we are

We don’t sell sites. We sell years.

Most studios pitch a project, ship a deliverable and disappear. The clients who get the most out of Observatory treat the studio as a long lens: somewhere between a fractional design lead and a creative partner who happens to also build the thing.

The longest engagement on the roster is eight years and counting. The next-longest is six. Not because the work needs constant fixing, because the most interesting moves tend to land in years two and three, when a founder is finally free to think about second acts instead of first impressions.

Observatory makes the kind of presence that compounds. A web build that gets sharper. A brand that ages forward. A photo library that doesn’t run out. Quiet, ongoing work for businesses going somewhere on purpose.

Pete sketching a site map on a whiteboard during a working session
FIG. 01 Pete photographing a client on location.
Peter Lloyd, founder of Observatory

Behind it

One founder, on every call.

Observatory was founded by Peter Lloyd in 2021, after a decade of UX and front-end work for software companies, most of it spent watching good ideas get smoothed out by handoffs. The studio exists to remove the smoothing-out: design and development run by the same hands that ran the discovery call.

Pete works out of Ithaca, NY (formerly Jersey City, before that New Brunswick). He photographs wellness practitioners on home turf and travels for paid gigs anywhere a flight goes. He plays guitar in a death metal band called Replicant, which he co-founded in 2015. He’ll happily explain headless CMS to a yoga teacher in plain English, and the ins and outs of Storyblok to anyone who asks twice.

If you’ve spent a year evaluating studios that all pitched the same proof of concept and didn’t really listen. Pete is the one who shows up to the second call having actually read the deck.

Track record 21 engagements, audited and counting.
21
Engagements
Across 8 years on the roster
8 yrs
Longest retainer
And still running
8
Industries served
From wellness to powersports
100%
From referrals
Zero from cold outreach

The collective

A small studio with a bigger room.

When a project needs more than one set of hands, we bring in named collaborators we’ve worked with for years, not freelancers we found on a marketplace last week. Each gets credited on the work and paid like a partner.

Principles

Five things we won’t talk you out of.

  1. 01

    Curiosity is the differentiator.

    The brief that wins is the one we’re still asking questions about on the seventh call. Most studios get bored on the third.

  2. 02

    Patience is the proof.

    No urgency theatre. No countdowns. The pacing of the work feels like the kind of partner you’d want for a year, because that is the work.

  3. 03

    Show the work, then the words.

    Cases and pictures lead. Copy is generous when it earns it, terse when it doesn’t. We’d rather under-write a section than pad it.

  4. 04

    One bold move per surface.

    A homepage doesn’t need three exclamations and a fireworks show. It needs one moment that pays the user’s attention back.

  5. 05

    The observatory is a tool, not a metaphor.

    Discovery, perspective, precision, reaching new heights: how the studio actually works. Not stickers on top of an otherwise generic agency.

    6.

Honest answers

Who we’re for. Who we’re not.

The shortest discovery call in the world is the one where neither side is the right fit. We’d rather get there in five minutes than fifty.

A partner if you’re…
  • Past the scrappy / MVP stage. Real revenue, real customers, real stakes.
  • Looking at a bigger competitor’s site and quietly hating that yours doesn’t keep up.
  • Willing to invest past the bare minimum, and decisive enough to keep moving.
  • Looking for a year-long partner, not a one-and-done vendor.
Probably not the fit if you’re…
  • Shopping for the cheapest Squarespace setup. There are good ones; this isn’t one.
  • Hiring an agency-of-record. The studio is project + retainer, not WPP.
  • Looking for a Webflow contractor specifically, without design-led work attached.
  • At enterprise procurement scale. Different sales cycle, different shop.
If you’ve gotten this far on the about page, you’re already doing the kind of due diligence the best partnerships start with. The fastest way to find out if Observatory is a fit is a thirty-minute call: no deck, no pitch, just a working conversation about what you’re trying to build.
Peter Lloyd Founder, Observatory

Ready?

Let’s build something worth keeping.

Get in touch
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