About Decotide
The studio behind the deco
Decotide started in 2023 with a simple complaint: too many good Miami businesses were paying agency prices for template thinking. Our name comes from the two things we build around — the stepped, sun-bleached geometry of Miami's deco architecture, and the tide. Search doesn't hold still. Algorithms shift, seasons shift, whole neighborhoods of demand rise and fall with the snowbirds. You can fight that, or you can learn to work with it. We named the studio for the second option.
Founder Nick Ocean grew up in Newcastle, NSW — a surf town north of Sydney, the kind of upbringing where you surf before school and figure out the rest later. He picked up his first freelance clients at university, then spent the better part of a decade at Sydney agencies learning the actual craft of search — and learning to hate the churn: the client turnover, the templated audits, the retainers sold on fear instead of results.
In 2021 he moved to New York for a brand-and-search role, running programs for brands that needed to rank in a market with no mercy in it. Miami was only supposed to be a side project — a client engagement that had him flying down for a quarter. He stayed for the light, and because he kept noticing the same thing over and over: brilliant, well-run local businesses getting sold the same cookie-cutter SEO package as everyone else, in a city too specific and too bilingual for cookie-cutter to work. He founded Decotide in 2023. He still hasn't found a proper flat white in this town — he's stopped holding his breath — but he calls the ocean "the surf" without noticing he's doing it, and he stayed.
How we work
Working principles, not platitudes
No retainers for retainers' sake
If a project doesn't need ongoing work, we'll say so and hand you a maintenance plan instead. We've turned away renewals we couldn't justify — ask us about it.
We show the data
Every client gets the same dashboards we look at: rankings, traffic, and the queries actually converting. No black box, no quarterly highlight reel.
Hand-drawn, hand-coded
No page builders, no stock icon packs. Every site is designed in the studio and hand-coded to load fast — Dom rejects anything that ships bloated JavaScript.
English and Spanish from day one
Bilingual search isn't a bolt-on service we sell after the fact. If your customers search in Spanish, that strategy gets built into the site's architecture from the first sitemap.
The team
Four people, no account layer
Decotide stays small on purpose. Every project runs through the four of us — there's no junior bench doing the actual work while a senior name closes the deal.
Nick Ocean
Founder & Creative Director
Nick grew up in Newcastle, NSW, cut his teeth at Sydney agencies for the better part of a decade, then moved to New York in 2021 for a brand-and-search role before trading winters for Biscayne Bay and founding Decotide in 2023. He started the studio because Miami businesses kept getting sold retainers instead of results.
Still calls the ocean 'the surf' and is on a years-long quest for a proper flat white in Miami.
Marisol Vega
Director of Bilingual SEO
Marisol grew up above her family's bakery two blocks off Calle Ocho and has spent a decade doing SEO for brands that need to win in both English and Spanish. She leads Decotide's bilingual search practice.
Marisol grew up two blocks off Calle Ocho, above the family bakery, which means her bilingual practice isn't a class she took — it's the language two generations of her customers actually search in. She still won't call a panadería's pastelitos better than her grandmother's, and none have come close.
Judges every panadería in Miami against her grandmother's pastelitos. None have won yet.
Imani Brooks
Content & Editorial Lead
Imani spent eight years in Miami newsrooms before moving into content strategy. She brings a reporter's discipline to Decotide's editorial work: real sourcing, real structure, no filler.
Keeps a running map of every mural in Wynwood and can date most of them on sight.
Dominic "Dom" Ferreira
Head of Design & Engineering
Dom is Decotide's design engineer — the reason the sites ship hand-drawn and still load in under a second. He came to Miami from São Paulo's product-design scene and never left.
Measures every website he visits in Core Web Vitals and will tell you about it, unprompted.
The studio
Small on purpose, out of Wynwood
We work out of a studio space in Wynwood — Decotide is fully independent, with no parent network and no shared holding-company playbook dictating how we price or staff projects.
Staying small is the point, not a limitation we're growing out of. Every client works directly with the person doing the strategy or the build, not an account manager relaying notes to someone else's desk. That's also why we're upfront about capacity — we'd rather say no to a project than hand it to someone junior.
Want to work with the actual people who'll do the work?
Tell us about your business and we'll tell you honestly whether we're the right fit — no account layer, no filler.