About
A studio for apps that earn their place on your home screen.
We make small, paper-feeling apps. Each one keeps to one careful job and shows up calmly when you need it.
Why a studio
Small, separate, shippable.
Murakami Labs is a label, not a roadmap. Each app is small and folds together in eight to twelve weeks. The shop shares a back room (auth, payments, design system), but each app keeps its own front window.
The shop compounds. The first app teaches the second what it won’t have to learn twice: the build pipeline, the marketing playbook, the support workflow. After a few apps, the back room is the moat.
The studio brand never elbows the product brand for attention. On an App Store listing, you see the product. Murakami Labs sits quietly in the developer-name field, where it belongs.
Brand pillars
Three things we hold to.
Friendly utility
Useful first, charming second. If the charm gets in the way of the work, we cut it. The paper-craft look is decoration; the app works underneath.
Earned playfulness
Visual whimsy shows up where it earns its keep. A paper-cut feather on Polmi’s icon is there because the app is about lifting the words that matter.
Calm confidence
The app does its work without shouting. No exclamation marks in default UI copy. No rocket-emoji launch animations. Confidence shows in what ships.
A note
From the desk.
I want Murakami Labs to feel like a small bookshop on a quiet street. Careful shelves, a clear point of view, nothing crowded. Polmi is the first thing on those shelves. A few more are being folded, slowly.
-Vlad
The name
Why ‘Murakami’.
A tribute to the literary register of Haruki Murakami: slightly surreal, calm, deliberate prose; warm but never sentimental; quietly observant. We aim for the same feeling in product: never shouty, always specific, a little wry.
We’re not affiliated with the author. He is a great writer; we ship apps. The borrowed name is a register, not a claim.