MCWD Labs was originally founded in Nashville, Tennessee in 1995 as Music City Web Design. Those were the earliest days of the commercial web. The first client work was simple sites for Nashville-area businesses. Within a few years the work had expanded into ecommerce — then a new category — and custom software, including original screen-scraping tools that the studio sold to Wall Street research analysts.
§ — About the Studio
A thirty-year studio, reopened for client work.
Originally founded in Nashville in 1995. Currently based in Hartford, Connecticut, and taking on select new engagements.
Through the late 1990s and 2000s the studio shipped hundreds of projects: multi-thousand-SKU online retailers, platforms for real-estate agencies and trade associations, fitness applications, custom mapping software, visualization tools, and websites for businesses from regional barbecue chains to national nonprofits. The client list spanned Nashville, the southeast, and eventually the country. The studio's specialty settled on three things: ecommerce at scale, data infrastructure, and custom software that fit how a specific business actually worked.
In 2013 the studio's principal work shifted into ecommerce leadership at a major independent retailer in Boston, followed by more than a decade of consulting and operating roles in beverage-alcohol retail across New England. That decade produced a body of vertical-specific knowledge — the Beverage Retail Ecommerce Framework, the PriceGun.io pricing intelligence platform, and the BevBay.com consumer search engine.
MCWD Labs is based in Hartford, Connecticut, and has reopened for select new client engagements. The impetus is practical. The studio's thesis is that modern development tools — including AI-assisted tools like Claude Code & Design — have changed the economics of custom software, ecommerce, and web work in ways that make small senior studios more capable than they've ever been. PriceGun.io is evidence of that thesis: a real product in production, built by a small senior team on a timeline that would have been impossible two years ago.
We're interested in finding out what else is currently possible. The studio is taking on websites, ecommerce builds, custom software, data work, and consulting — with a bias toward operators in New England who want to work directly with a senior team.
Small senior team. Direct communication. Working software every week. We use modern tools aggressively, including AI-assisted development where it makes the work better, faster, or more reliable. We don't use juniors, we don't offshore, and we don't subcontract client work without disclosing it.
Every engagement begins with a conversation. Most engagements begin with an email.