Alex
Mercer
Alex leads design at FICAVO with a conviction that the best interfaces are invisible — they get out of the way and let people do what they came to do. Previously IDEO, Airbnb, and a handful of well-funded startups you've probably used.
Design isn't decoration — it's the product.
Alex founded FICAVO in 2019 after a decade working at the intersection of design and product — at consultancies, agencies, and as an in-house lead. The studio grew from a frustration he kept encountering: design and engineering treated as sequential handoffs rather than a collaborative process that runs in parallel.
At IDEO he learned to design for systems, not screens. At Airbnb he learned that great design scales through culture and tooling, not taste alone. At FICAVO, he's brought both lessons together into a studio where that integration is baked into how every project runs.
He splits his time between client work, mentoring the team's designers, and writing about design systems — he publishes one article a month on the FICAVO blog.
