On 7 October 2016, Novicell UK was a newly registered company in London and not much else. Ten years on, we want to look back at how we got here and thank the people who made it happen.
Where it started
Our story begins in Aarhus, Denmark, in 1998. From day one, Novicell cared about the practical side of the web: building things properly and making sure they worked. The company grew around two pillars: valuing honest communication and efficient ways of working. They still describe how we try to work, and they came with us to London.
Over the next 18 years, Novicell built a deep body of work in content management systems and e-commerce platforms. By 2016, it was ready to look beyond Denmark, and the UK came first.
That summer, Novicell asked Anders Holt to build a UK business from scratch. Anders had been in London since 2013, working as sales director for a translation company, and had previously set up operations in Denmark and Sweden. He knew what starting from nothing looked like.
The London office opened that October. It was Novicell’s first location outside Denmark, at a time when the group employed 160 people. Other European countries followed: Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden.
Revlon. The British Library. Arriva. The British Medical Association.
A cosmetics brand, a national institution, a transport operator and a professional body. Those early years meant saying yes to good work across very different sectors and learning something from every project.
We hired on character rather than credentials and ran an internship programme from early on.
Beyond the client work
Some of the moments we’re proudest of happened outside client projects. We worked with Hackney Giving, a local charity, on social media and SEO to raise awareness and donations during the cost-of-living crisis. We also ran our first Business Online conference at the Museum of London, with 250 people in the room. A portion of the proceeds went to Project Zambia, a cause we’ve supported for a long time.
Finding our focus
After years of building for clients across so many industries, one thing became clear: we could make a real difference to law firms. Many were working with inherited websites that were no longer fit for purpose, or competitive in the world they now operate in.
When we looked at what we had built elsewhere, the gap was obvious. Structures and methods that had become routine in other industries were still missing in legal. So, with the wider Novicell team behind us, we doubled down.
It has paid off. Today, we work with large law firms that need more than an average website estate. They needed to catch up and then go further than the industry had imagined.
In practice, that means platform consolidations and multi-jurisdiction builds on Umbraco for law firms, including Hill Dickinson, Reed Smith, Harneys and professional services firms such as AlixPartners.
Our work with law firms and professional services organisations
The next 10 years
We want to be the go-to provider of modern websites for law firms globally. More than that, we want to be the partner who is always up for the challenge. The future is moving quickly, and none of us knows exactly where its heading, but we trust ourselves, our team and the people we work with.
Thank you
To every client who trusted us with something that mattered, including the ones from the very early years. To the people who built Novicell UK: the ones still here and the ones who have moved on. And to our Danish office, for backing a London office before there was anything in London to back.
Thank you for the people, the teams and the laughs along the way. Every one of those moments brought us here.
Ten years. Here’s to the next ten
