Studio Marelle helps product teams move with
conviction at the moments that matter most.
Focused evidence and direction for an important product decision moving faster than your team’s confidence.
Identify what is preventing users from activating, adopting, converting, or returning, and what to change next.
Customer and market evidence for consequential product bets, new directions, and larger strategic uncertainty.
Ongoing senior research and product-strategy support for teams navigating fast-moving, compounding decisions.
Real-world evaluation of how people trust, monitor, interrupt, recover from, and delegate work to action-taking AI.
Turn scattered customer evidence, product data, and competing hypotheses into a coherent decision framework.
Studio Marelle was founded by Kira Vella in the San Francisco startup ecosystem. Now based in New York City, we work globally with founders and product teams who want to build with clarity, bridging behavioral insight and strategic execution at the inflection points that matter most.
We spent years inside product and research teams, watching good ideas ship without ever truly connecting to the people they were built for. Features were moving. Decisions were compounding. But something was missing.
"Marelle," the French word for hopscotch, is how we see growth. Not linear. Iterative, intentional, and full of moments where you pause, adjust, and move forward with purpose. We built our practice around supporting exactly those moments.
Partnership Over Prescription: We work with your team, not over it. Every engagement shapes around your goals, your culture, your pace.
Strategy Rooted in Human Insight: Real behavior is our compass. We translate what people actually do into decisions that hold up beyond the slide deck.
Growth as an Iterative Journey: Every project is an opportunity to refine, adjust, and build toward something stronger.
Outcome: Week-one retention improved from 40% to 76% following a three-phase behavioral research and redesign strategy.
Outcome: Surfaced a critical perception gap and delivered a prioritized action framework ahead of the next product phase.
Outcome: Early signal research replaced guesswork with a grounded product strategy, eliminating rework risk before development scaled.
AI can execute a team’s interpretation of a problem before the team has fully examined it. What happens to product intent along the way?
