10 Year Anniversary for The Virtual Forge

Studio members The Virtual Forge celebrated their 10th anniversary in 2020, and we invited them to share their story with us. Huge congratulations to The Virtual Forge on a brilliant first decade!


Ten years ago Matt Wicks and Garrett Doyle formed The Virtual Forge with the goal of creating a company where people wanted to work, respected each other and created great and beautiful software. They wanted to bridge the gap between design and development and come to a common understanding, creating more cohesively designed and developed products.

The objective was to form a team of bright, creative and inspiring professionals who were keen, able to challenge and were sufficiently enthused by the love of their daily creations, whichever part of the business they joined.

We’re now a global team, spanning 3 continents, with a client base we’re immensely proud of.

The early days …

The Virtual Forge was founded in Bath in October 2010 by Garrett and Matt, but our story begins before then, in a small town in America in 1987 where The XL Group was founded. We acquired The XL Group in 2017 and this is now our Data Centre of Excellence in Philadelphia.

Initially, Virtual Forge was a very small team based in the UK, including our current Head of DevOps, Christian Backlund. This team quickly grew and in subsequent years we opened offices in various locations including India (2013), Portugal (2014) and the USA in 2017 with the acquisition of The XL Group.

The home of our UK operation is Glove Factory Studios, a rural workspace near Bath, alongside offices in London and Warwick.

The bit between the beginning and now is a long story, full of lessons learned, successes and failures. We’re delighted to say there are many more successes than failures, and we’d like to thank everyone who has played an important role in getting us to where we are now.

And now?

We’re a global software company that is immensely proud of the development, UX, data and cloud services we provide our clients. With over 100 people working from the UK to Dubai, to Bratislava, Portugal and the US, Virtual Forge is truly virtual by name and virtual by nature.

In 2020, we’ve proved that the team really can pull together in the midst of huge disruption. So, here’s to the next decades of The Virtual Forge.

We’ll just leave this here with a simple sign-off: whatever comes next, we’re certain it’ll be big.

 

 

 

Words courtesy of Gemma Christie at The Virtual Forge.