by Hardy Sidhu

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Six months set the tone for a year.
Ours set a high one.

In the first half of 2026 we repositioned brands for a global stage, shipped a digital experience that outperformed agencies many times our size, relaunched a sold-out community, opened operations in a new country, built our own software, and finished a book. We did all of it as what we have always been: a lean, independent digital product studio that backs itself against anyone, on any stage.

This is not a victory lap. It is a marker. A reminder of what a focused team can do when it refuses to confuse scale with quality. Here is the half in full.

Repositioning Praemia REIM for a digital-first world

We opened the year with Praemia REIM. The brief was simple to state and hard to do well: reposition the brand in a digital landscape that had moved on, and give it an identity to match.

We delivered a new digital identity and a new corporate global marketing website built for their operations and the audiences that matter to them. Not a refresh. A reposition. The kind of work that resets how a brand shows up and who takes it seriously.

Alpiq: turning sustainability into a digital pillar

Our role with Alpiq grew this half. As their digital innovation team, we expanded our support across every new sustainable energy initiative, helping turn sustainability into a bigger pillar of the offering and delivering it through digital means.

This is the kind of partnership we value most: trusted, embedded, and pointed at work that matters. When a client lets you sit inside the problem rather than at arm's length from it, the work gets better and so do the outcomes.

Pendragon: a small studio on the biggest stage

This one matters to us.

Our digital experience with Pendragon was more than a project. It was a statement: a small studio can outperform a big agency on the biggest stage. We did not just hold our own against far larger players. We out-delivered them.

If you ever needed proof that headcount and quality are not the same thing, this was it. The advantage of a lean team is not that we cost less. It is that we move with intent, we keep the people who pitch the work on the work, and nothing gets lost in the layers.

UXCrunch is back, and selling out every month

We relaunched UXCrunch, and every event since has sold out.

Great speakers. Rooms that fill the moment tickets go live. Backing from companies like Lloyd's Bank and CodeRabbit. UXCrunch has always been about putting the design and product community in one room and giving it something worth turning up for. This year it is firing on every cylinder, and the demand tells us the community has been waiting for it.

Global rollouts for our gaming clients

We supported our gaming clients through new brand and experience rollouts at global scale.

High stakes, high visibility, unforgiving timelines: exactly the conditions a lean team is built for. When a launch has to land across markets at once, you do not want a chain of approvals. You want a small group that owns the outcome end to end.

A new digital touchpoint for Gale & Co.

We designed and built a new digital touchpoint for our good friend Sam Gale at Gale & Co.

Gale & Co. is reframing how design talent and design teams come together, around the structural conditions that actually make hiring work rather than hiring alone. It is sharp thinking, and we were glad to give it a home online that does it justice.

We opened operations in Slovakia

We officially opened our Central Europe entity this half, with operations now based in Bratislava.

It is a real step in building Format-3 as a genuinely European studio: closer to talent, closer to clients, and built for how we want to grow. Roots in more than one place, with the same standard everywhere.

We built our own tools

QA and website experience auditing had become a genuine friction point in how we work. So we did what we do best. We built our way out of it.

Our first internal tool, designed and built in-house, takes the pain out of auditing website experience and quality. It makes us faster, sharper, and more consistent for clients. And it turned out good enough that we will be releasing it publicly soon, so others can put it to work too.

From Metal to Relationship, and a move on BMW

We finished our thought leadership report on the future of automotive: From Metal to Relationship. It makes the case for a shift from hardware-led businesses to relationship-led ones, drawing on years of work across the industry. It lands in the coming months.

It does not arrive alone. Alongside it comes our unsolicited invitation to BMW: a full, working proof of concept that we believe will shake the industry. We will have much more to say on that soon.

Onwards

Add to all of this the dozens of smaller wins that never make the headline but make the work: the pitches, the prototypes, the late calls, the launches that went off without a sound because they were built right.

Six months in, the thesis holds. Lean beats large. Now for the second half.

By Hardy Sidhu

Founder & CEO Format-3

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