Alster: Change Makers

Alster is the Swedish word for ”a piece of handicraft,” a "product of legacy" or the "outcome of profound work." It is what lies in the agency’s DNA. The brand’s identity is shaped around crafting unique user experiences inspired by the specific needs of the agency’s clients and partners. Moreover, how they work is just as important as the quality and sustainability of what they deliver.

Alster, which is the result of a merger between the renowned Swedish technology agency Isotop and the digital design studio Another State, is a consultancy that offers unique skilled teams and services in digital product and service development. The team of around 60 experts has over twenty years of experience in creating digital products people love and giving businesses the insights, security, and scalability they need to transform. Alster’s team can deliver holistic, strategic, and innovative solutions without the usual blind spots between design and technology. Alster is an integrated powerhouse of knowledge and capabilities customized to their clients' and partners’ individual needs. They are the definition of excellency.

Section titled A passion for craftsmanship when building digital products A passion for craftsmanship when building digital products

In today’s market, where the average person spends around 40% of their life interacting with digital services, we can confidently say that the world is in need of different digital consultancies that can ensure a perfect user experience every time. Such consultancy is Alster. They are passionate about the craftsmanship required to build digital products and the skills needed to keep developing them.

Alster is different in many ways: They have more diverse ways of integrating with clients/partners, different ways of looking at shared risk and reward, and last but not least, a very different and specific know-how to secure a successful product or service. Their operations are modeled to provide excellent quality and the most amazing and professional service every single time, no exception!

Their model is streamlined to serve both large-cap enterprises and small startups with custom digital development teams, reducing the risk of failed recruitments. Regardless of the size of the project, the team at Alster has one ultimate goal: Exceptional collaboration with their clients. Since they often build augmented teams together with their clients, they make sure to cater for knowledge transfer within the new team from the very beginning. In order to co-create with their clients, Alster emphasizes the importance of effective listening to learn the fundamentals of their clients’ businesses and the industry that the expertise from the client side brings to the team. Therefore, the goal is always to ensure ease of communication and the development of personal relations within the new teams. Once that is established, extraordinary results come easy.

Section titled Are you interested in changing the world with Alster? Are you interested in changing the world with Alster?

The team at Alster has more than 20 years of experience working in the Internet technology sector in Sweden, an environment that has fostered several global tech unicorn companies. The team members, who have work experience in the global tech unicorn companies mentioned, are highly skilled in digital product development. The skills, experience and tools they bring to the table, combined with the collaboration with their clients/partners, are what sets them apart. But that’s not all! When they set out to formalize the Alster model and their offering, the team made a strong decision to focus on sustainable work as well as to prioritize collaboration with clients and partners who have a clear and calculated offering that contributes to a better world. As they continue to push this approach into the future, we are happy that an agency with such excellency, expertise, and point of view is our certified partner. You can see their profile and get in touch with them via their Storyblok Listing.

Section titled Collaborating with Storyblok Collaborating with Storyblok

Having discovered headless architecture from the start, Alster wanted to collaborate with technologies that have the same setup. In doing so, the team came across multiple Content Management Systems (CMS) but non of them seemed to satisfy their clients’ need for a user-friendly and intuitive content management experience. Luckily, Storyblok came to the rescue and the team at Alster was thrilled to finally have a CMS with a visual editor and preview option that checks all the boxes for their clients.

A headless CMS like Storyblok allows Alster to acquire clients with ease as the CMS integrates with any technology in the market. Therefore, they are able to use multiple frontend frameworks while working with Storyblok. The static site generation framework Gatsby.js allows them to build performant and safe clients for several applications. To build and deploy their Gatsby applications they have utilized both Gatsby’s SaaS service called Gatsby Cloud and their own deployment pipelines in Azure DevOps. Recently they have also developed clients using the framework Next.js to consume Storyblok content. Several of their projects also integrate with e-commerce platforms such as Commercetools and Norce Commerce.

Section titled Case Study: H&M Circulator Case Study: H&M Circulator

Alster’s dedication to creating a better world can clearly be seen in their work. In their collaboration with H&M Group, Alster helped develop the visual concept and the external website for “Circulator”. A digital tool to help with circular product development. The project, H&M Circulator is a way of empowering H&M’s teams internally as well as other companies and designers to design for circularity and transition towards a circular business model. Changing how they develop products will have a real impact. Going circular not only reduces pressure on virgin resources and avoids waste — it contributes to wider sustainability goals around climate and biodiversity.

H&M’s requirement was to build a highly innovative user experience in terms of visual design, which required the need for a great editor experience tool. In order to satisfy the request, Alster decided to use Storyblok in combination with other technologies like Gatsby, Gatsby Cloud, and MS Azure. This combination created a futureproof architecture for a stable and safe client experience.

Section titled Partner of the Month Partner of the Month

Alster is truly, and equally, both a technology and design-driven firm. It's what lies in their DNA. They create big ideas right along with their technology experts, having an equal voice at the table, every step of the way. The brand’s identity is shaped around crafting unique user experiences inspired by the specific needs of their clients and partners. The team at Alster works very hard to understand, inspire, and share their clients’ vision of where they would like to take their digital business. Moreover, Alster is focused on sustainable work as well as prioritizing collaboration with clients and partners who have a clear and calculated offering that contributes to a better world.

It is a true pleasure to announce that Alster is our August Partner of the Month. You can get in touch with them by visiting their website. You can also find them on our Partners List.