Millow

Make the site feel like the product.

Millow AB ferments Swedish oats and mycelium into clean-label protein in Gothenburg. The site they had worked. It loaded, it explained, nothing was broken. The ask was harder than a redesign: make the website feel like the product itself. Crafted, warm, alive.

Two constraints shaped everything. A strict brand handbook with real laws in it, like mascots never sit on salmon and headings stay at eight words or fewer. And two audiences reading the same pages at once: the school-kitchen buyer who checks allergen tables before anything else, and the investor who needs to feel where the company is going.

The handbook became six laws.

I read the brand handbook the way I read a spec, then translated it into six UI laws that live in the codebase. A script word sits under every big heading, never above it. Sections meet in soft pillow seams. The brand biscuit stays bare, never ringed, never dressed up. Shadows fall hard and offset, not as soft blurs.

A rule that lives in code does not depend on memory. Every new page inherits the laws by default, so the site cannot drift off brand between releases.

The biscuit is the only light.

The landing hero went through three concepts in five days. The winner strips the stage to black and hands the whole page to the brand biscuit, the only source of light on it.

On desktop the light chases your cursor, so the first thing a visitor does on millow.co is play. Phones have no cursor, so the light sweeps the stage on its own, like a searchlight. And when a system asks for reduced motion, the stage holds still and every word still reads. This is the part of the project I am proudest of.

Rebuilt around the buyer's four numbers.

The Food Service page used to talk like a brochure. We rebuilt it around the four numbers a professional kitchen buyer actually checks: free from all 14 allergens, salt the kitchen controls, yield in the pan, and climate. The climate claim is not self-graded: 97 percent less CO2 than beef, per RISE, the Swedish research institute.

Then the story film. It plays itself at 30 frames per second while claim stickers pop around the frame, and it never takes your scroll hostage. No scroll traps anywhere on the page. The film runs, the page stays a page.

The same pulse in one hand.

None of this is desktop theater. The dark stage, the four numbers, and the film all ship on the phone with nothing watered down.

Craft you can audit.

A site that claims craft should sit for the exam. Every merge runs a local CI gate: 575 unit tests, 113 end-to-end tests in both languages, a Lighthouse performance budget, and secret scanning. All of it green before anything lands.

The design side got the same discipline: 56 tracked design rounds with the founder. The first release went live mid-August 2026. The full V2 lands early September.