A modern creative agency headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, The Digital Panda focuses on high-end visual design that includes interactive experiences, websites, apps, and branding. Founder Ilya Kroogman has been running the agency full-time for six years, and his team of 20 is fully distributed around the world, from Vancouver and Toronto to London, South Africa, Venezuela, Brazil, Ukraine, and Asia. They pride themselves on creating noteworthy interactive user experiences for clients that include financial institutions, startups, blockchain companies, and, recently, a VR surgery training company.
Prior to Webflow, The Digital Panda relied on WordPress, but the design and development process required extensive coding, which increased costs by requiring expensive development talent and also slowed down project timelines. For even minor debugging and site maintenance, they’d have to involve developers. They were also constantly in fear of providing clients access to a site or UI that could potentially break. “As a small agency, we wanted to use our limited headcount and resources more efficiently,” says Ilya.
When Ilya heard about Webflow, he immediately signed up and was so impressed he switched all of his projects to Webflow in one day. Webflow gave The Digital Panda the power to design, build, and execute a website at least 10 times faster than WordPress, with fewer bugs. “With Webflow, we can create a design, and then immediately implement it with less resources,” Ilya says.
Unparalleled freedom to create impactful content
We successfully migrated two sites, conducted a complete redesign, and created numerous animations within six months — a feat that wouldn’t have been possible without the power of Webflow.
With Webflow, The Digital Panda can move and pivot quickly for clients with fast turnarounds. For example, a client approached the team over the holidays with a tight deadline. They were able to turn the design around in three weeks — then build the website in two days. “That kind of speed is unimaginable with anything else,” Ilya says.
One of The Digital Panda’s more recent projects involved the redesign and development of the entire Cambrian Credit Union website. The goal was to encourage customers to find answers themselves by providing access to a large FAQ knowledge base that was intuitive to use. Webflow components were instrumental in the project's success, allowing the team to build a reusable library of components that sped up the wire-framing process and allowed their team to swap out content to suit each individual page at scale.
By enabling The Digital Panda to move faster with fewer resources, Webflow empowers Ilya’s team to work better together and with their clients. They relish the ability to create a design and implement it visually, manage campaigns, and modify sites quickly — without worrying about code quality, exporting, setting up servers, or infrastructure. And when they do hand off a project to a client, they’re confident in its stability. “Webflow has significantly helped us reduce resources because we’re able to front load our UX/UI team, with a smaller web development team to support project creation,” Ilya says.
Confidently embracing the future of visual development
Webflow has given us the incredible superpower to create very sophisticated websites and products, and connect advanced APIs without code. It allows us to act like a bigger agency and create more complex projects at scale.
Generally, The Digital Panda aims to be agnostic of technology, but 90% of its projects are done in Webflow. Ilya and his team love how lightweight the platform is, affording users extreme agility and the ability to seamlessly create end-to-end campaigns. They can move quickly to modify their own marketing website, which frees them up to focus on new projects and build client relationships.
The Digital Panda also relishes working directly with the Webflow team as an Enterprise Partner, acting as a sounding board to help shape the product, provide insights, and influence strategy. With priority support, exclusive introductions to more enterprise clients, and access to updates, the partnership positions The Digital Panda on the forefront of its industry.
For Ilya, Webflow is a long-term solution that allows his team to go beyond websites and marketing campaigns to create anything they can dream up, including full-scale applications — all without the need for a full-stack development team. “With DevLink, we can create really robust React- or web-based experiences connected to data, and export everything directly from Webflow,” Ilya says. Streamlining the design-to-development process, DevLink enables the team to skip tedious pixel-pushing and leverage ready-to-use React components complete with props and interactions. “We can move so much faster with this powerful development workflow, which gives us a huge competitive advantage.”
As Webflow continues to release new updates and extend the capabilities of what’s possible, the sky’s the limit for The Digital Panda.