A small shop
for large specifications.
Brand New Level is run from Weesp, next to Amsterdam, as a network rather than an agency: a small core that pulls in specialists across Europe per problem. It exists to build products, not to sell hours.
Pampuslaan 59
1382 JM Weesp
Netherlands
Founded by Kiril Nachev. Tech made in Europe, with a preference for privacy-respecting defaults and licences that do not surprise anyone later.
What a foundry is,
and what it is not.
A foundry makes things and puts its name on them. It is not a studio that makes things for other people and puts their name on them. Both are honourable; only one of them is this.
Popcorn, PageWebPro, Kerf and hAire are ours: the roadmap, the engineering and the consequences. Customers buy a product, not a project.
Colour engines, machine-file encoders, render pipelines, protocol surfaces. If a problem can be solved by wiring two SaaS products together, it is not ours to solve.
A small core, with specialists across Europe brought in where the problem needs them: printers, carpenters, colour people, hardware people. The person who knows the domain is usually not on the payroll, and should not have to be.
Client work lives at Brand Level, deliberately under a different name so nobody has to guess which one they are buying.
Four products from a team this size only works because the products share a spine: one design engine, one web platform, one attitude to formats.
How a product
gets started here.
Not a process diagram for a pitch deck. This is the actual order things happen in, and the point at which we are allowed to say a thing works.
Find the retyping
Look for the place a human is being used as a converter between two systems. That is where the product goes.
Read the specification
Properly, and all of it. Where no specification exists, get a corpus of real files from someone who has them.
Build the engine first
The hard part before the interface. If the output is wrong, a beautiful editor in front of it makes things worse, not better.
Prove it physically
Put it on a press. Load it on a machine. A format counts as supported when something real comes out correct, not when the tests are green.
Then make it pleasant
Hide every one of those specifications behind words the user already uses. The best outcome is that nobody ever learns what BTLx is.
What we are
allowed to say.
Marketing usually flattens four very different kinds of statement into one confident voice. We keep them apart, on purpose, and label them the same way on every page of this site.
A test or a machine says so
Something in the codebase asserts it on every commit, or a physical machine produced the right result.
We counted it, once
True at the time of writing and likely to drift. Stated with a hedge word so nobody quotes it as a guarantee.
Somebody else states it
Including us, elsewhere. Attributed to its source rather than absorbed into our own voice.
We would like it to be true
Superlatives, firsts, and market-position statements we cannot evidence. They stay off the site until they can be checked.
If you find a sentence on this site that does not survive that test, tell us and we will change it. The offer is not rhetorical. The address is at the bottom of every page.