25 years of change: How a Dublin digital agency evolved with Irish business

When we launched Matrix in 2000, nobody was talking about “digital transformation”. Most Irish companies just dreamed of a website that loaded quicker than a kettle boiling. 

Some 25 years later, we are a Dublin digital agency working with corporate teams across Europe, sitting in meetings about AI, cybersecurity and EU funding frameworks. Somewhere between those two points, the Irish corporate world changed completely. And we changed with it.

Here’s our view of that change, from a team that’s been building on the web since Y2K panic and screeching dial-up tones.

What it meant to be a Dublin digital agency in 2000

In 2000, the Celtic Tiger was still roaring. Ireland had moved from a relatively poor country to one of the fastest growing economies in the world, powered by foreign direct investment and a young, tech-savvy workforce.

But “digital” in corporate Ireland was basic.

• Companies were commissioning their very first simple website
• The website lived in the IT budget, not in big strategy meetings
• Nobody talked about user experience. Most sites were walls of text and tiny links, and visitor stats were big league stuff. 

Matrix started in that world as a small web development studio in Dublin, focused on building fast, functional sites that simply worked. No social feeds, no marketing tech stacks, no UX workshops. Just development that worked, a clear goal, and a bit of trust from a small number of early-adopter clients.

Those early projects taught us two things that still matter today:

1. Digital only matters if it works in the real world
2. Behind every brief or KPI, there is a human trying to do their job a bit better

From glossy brochures to buying online

By 2008, the world had changed again. Globally, eCommerce was maturing. In Ireland, the Celtic Tiger story was starting to crack, with an overheating property market and an economy about to tip into crisis.

That was the year we launched our first full eCommerce site.

For Irish corporates, eCommerce shifted digital from “nice brochure” to “critical revenue channel”. Overnight, conversations moved from colours and design layouts to:

• Abandoned baskets
• Integration with stock and ERP systems
• Payment security, trust signals and fraud checks

It was a crash course for the whole industry — clients and agencies. But it also made digital more human. When people put their card details into a form, suddenly every design and development choice felt more critical.

The crash, the bailout and the move to measurable marketing

The crash hit Ireland hard. Budgets shrank and vanished, projects froze, and suddenly every single euro spent had to be justified. For a Dublin digital agency, that could have been the end. Instead, it changed the type of work we did.

In 2011 we built our first in-house digital marketing team. SEO, analytics and campaigns became central to the Matrix offering.

Clients wanted three things:

• Visibility: Being found on Google, not just existing online
• Evidence: Reporting that showed what digital activity actually delivered
• Efficiency: Smarter ways to reach customers with smaller budgets

That pressure made everyone more disciplined. It is also where the modern Matrix really took shape, as a mix of strategists, designers, developers and marketers sitting at the same table.

By 2013, this approach had brought us our first international clients in the UK. In hindsight it was a small milestone, but a big mental shift. Suddenly, we were creating for audiences who would never set foot in Ireland.

The platform decade: mobile, cloud and the social web

If the crash forced digital to grow up, the 2010s made it inescapable. Smartphones put the web in everyone’s pocket. Cloud platforms reshaped how companies ran everything from finance to HR. Social media became a default communication channel and a major advertising marketplace.

For Irish corporates, that meant:

• Customers comparing you to global brands, not just local competitors
• Websites evolving into platforms, portals, booking engines and learning environments
• People wondering why the tools they used at work were clunkier than the apps on their phones.

For us, it meant moving from “website builders” to long-term product and platform partners. We spent as much time in workshops with operations teams as we did with marketing teams. The digital world was speeding up. The way to stay human was to slow conversations down:

• Talking to real users instead of guessing
• Mapping the full customer journey instead of just the homepage
• Asking “what problem does this solve?” before any line of code was written

GDPR and the age of digital trust

Then came GDPR. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation forced every business that handled personal data to examine how they collected, stored and used it, with real consequences for getting it wrong.

For Irish corporates this was another turning point. Consent, cookies, retention policies and access controls became everyday talking points. The conversation shifted from “how much data can we gather?” to “how do we earn the right to use it?”. Cookie banners replaced Microsoft Word’s Clippy assistant as the web’s most annoying feature, but behind them were millions of sites doing the hard work of building safer, more careful systems.

GDPR changed how we work too:

• Privacy and compliance reviews became standard in our UX and development process
• We helped clients balance marketing ambition with regulatory reality
• We started to talk about trust as a design problem, not just a legal one

The human thread in all of this is simple. People share information with organisations they trust to look after it. Technology can support that, but it cannot fake it.

The pandemic: Digital as a lifeline, not a side project

COVID-19 compressed years of digital change into a few months. Corporate teams that had been cautiously “rolling out” digital plans suddenly had to:

• Move whole workforces to remote or hybrid models
• Shift sales and service online, often within days
• Support customers who were anxious, isolated and increasingly dependent on digital channels

During that period, our work with Irish and European partners changed tone. Projects were no longer about optimisation. They were about keeping services available, information clear and communities connected.

That experience still shapes how we design and build. We think more about resilience, accessibility and stress. We assume people are multitasking, tired and using less-than-perfect devices and connections. Because often they are.

From Dublin studio to European digital partner

The last few years have opened a new chapter for Matrix.

• In 2022 we secured our first European Commission projects, bringing our UX, branding and development expertise into large, multi-country education and skills programmes
• In 2024 we opened a dedicated office in Brussels to stay close to those EU-level conversations
• In 2025 our work spans three continents, with projects live in Ireland, across Europe and with partners further afield

We are still the same Dublin digital agency at heart, the one that started out building fast sites for local businesses. We just sit in bigger rooms now, with more accents on video calls and more pieces to the puzzle.

What has not changed is the human bit:

• Taking time to understand how a new system will feel for a busy teacher, manager or small business owner
• Checking whether a form is still easy to use on a cracked phone screen on the bus home
• Writing pages in clear, friendly language instead of jargon
• Designing screens that make sense without a manual 
• Remembering there is always a real person behind every click

The tools are sharper and the stakes are higher, but the work is still about people trying to do real jobs in the middle of a noisy digital world.

What this all means for Irish businesses in 2025

If you look after the digital side of an Irish organisation today, your world is way more complex. You are juggling:

• Customer expectations set by global platforms
• Regulatory frameworks like GDPR and emerging rules around security and AI
• Pressure to demonstrate return on every euro spent
• Internal teams who expect consumer-grade digital tools at work
• Sustainability, accessibility and security requirements that did not exist in the same way before

The temptation is to look for the next big platform, the next AI tool, the next “fix”.

Our experience since 2000 suggests a different approach:

1. Treat digital as a long-term capability, not a one-off project
2. Invest in clarity, in your strategy, in your interfaces and in your content
3. Respect people’s time, attention and data
4. Choose partners who understand both the tech and the Irish and European context

That is where a Dublin digital agency like Matrix fits best. We speak boardroom, dev, EU funding and customer in the same conversation. We have lived through enough hype cycles to know most value is in the hard, unglamorous work.

And we still believe the most powerful thing in any digital project is not the code or the content. It’s the moment when a real person does something a bit quicker, easier or braver because you built the right thing for them.

Get in touch