Northwind Capital

Investor platform and CMS

The brief

A complete platform rebuild for a regulated asset manager — content-first, audit-friendly, and shippable by an in-house team without a design lead.

The challenge

Northwind had accumulated three legacy CMSs the way old houses accumulate wiring — every renovation added a new panel without unplugging the last. Marketing lived in WordPress. Investor relations in Sitecore. The partner biographies were, inexplicably, still in a static HTML site an intern had built in 2013 and nobody could locate the credentials for. Every content change went through compliance, then engineering, then a QA cycle that lasted longer than the piece stayed relevant. The marketing team, which had ideas, had shipped four microsites in the four years before we arrived — and roughly a hundred emails asking a developer to change a comma. The brief looked simple on paper: consolidate onto one stack, keep the compliance workflow, don't break anything. In an asset manager, 'don't break anything' is not a throwaway phrase — a stray sentence on the site can trigger a regulatory review that costs six figures to close. We needed to give the marketers velocity without giving them a single sharp object. Compounding the difficulty was the political reality that three separate agency vendors had failed the same brief in the previous four years, and each failure had made the next attempt harder to authorise. The board's patience for another 'platform project' was measured in weeks, not months.

Our approach

We rebuilt Northwind on a headless CMS (Sanity) with a granular role-based workflow that mirrored their internal chain of custody: draft, legal review, portfolio manager sign-off, publish. Compliance disclosures — the paragraphs that must appear on every page mentioning a product — were converted from copy-paste liabilities into component props, opt-out by design and audit-logged when they were changed. We embedded a small, opinionated component library on top of Next.js so marketers could compose new pages from thirty tested blocks without ever writing HTML or waiting for an engineer. The design system doubled as the documentation site: every component page shipped as a working example, tokens, dos and don'ts, and a compliance note where relevant. Post-launch we ran a two-week enablement bootcamp with the marketing team; by the end of it they had shipped three campaign pages entirely on their own. Twelve months on, they'd shipped one hundred and forty, with zero compliance escalations and a lighthouse performance score their previous CTO had told them was 'impossible for a regulated site'. The unexpected downstream effect was cultural. When marketers stopped filing tickets for comma changes, engineering stopped resenting marketing; when engineering stopped resenting marketing, they started attending each other's kickoffs. Northwind's next two product launches were the first in the company's history where the marketing site went live on the same day as the product page in the client portal. That kind of alignment is what a good platform actually buys you — not just velocity, but a shared surface everyone can trust and everyone can build on. Two more legal-review checkpoints were dropped from the process in year two, once the compliance team could see, in production dashboards, that the guardrails were catching what they had previously been catching by hand.

Outcomes

“It's the only studio I've worked with that ships engineering at the same level as their identity work.”— Daniel Reyes, CTO