Sponsored Article
Dropbox is a global leader in secure collaboration and content management, helping millions of teams organize, share and streamline their work. As the company expanded its vision into AI-powered workflows, including with its Dropbox Dash product, its partnership with McLaren F1 Team became a pivotal moment to showcase that evolution, demanding a digital experience worthy of both brands’ reputation for speed, precision and innovation.
It needed to do more than communicate a sponsorship. It needed to shift perception. Many still associate Dropbox primarily with cloud storage, and this experience had to demonstrate its evolution into an AI-powered workspace used by sophisticated creative and marketing teams.
“We needed a website that communicated the shared strengths and stories of both brands: efficiency, speed and technical excellence. We wanted to highlight Dropbox Dash, helping show that it’s much more than ‘just cloud storage’,” said Bijan Rafie-Tari, Senior Brand Producer, Dropbox. “By partnering with McLaren, we could highlight this with a site that felt premium, and as high-performing as the partnership itself.”
The Brand Challenge: Showcasing a Powerful Partnership
Before this project, the partnership was communicated on a static web page built on a legacy platform. While it shared some of the basics of the partnership, it did not do so in a way that inspired or engaged site visitors.
“Our prior CMS platform was not delivering, with limited page engagement and retention. We wanted a new tool, to elevate the messaging, and do so in a way that pushed what’s possible in the design and craft of good websites,” said Michael Chiu, Senior Brand Designer, Dropbox.
Webflow became the natural home for that ambition, not as a one-off experiment, but as part of a broader shift away from a legacy tech stack that constrained speed and creativity.
A Trusted Team, a Familiar Platform
Dropbox didn’t begin this project from a standing start. The team had already seen what was possible with Webflow, and with Daybreak Studio, a trusted Webflow Partner, through earlier collaborations like the ambitious Dropbox Brand Guidelines site. That work helped shift internal perceptions about how modern, web-native storytelling could elevate the brand and set the foundation for a more expressive digital experience tied to the McLaren partnership.
Daybreak Studio Founder & Creative Director Taha Hossain captured that shared ambition: “A huge part of this collaboration has been elevating how Dropbox has been represented, and from our side, we really care about creating great narrative-driven and experientially engaging digital experiences. The Dropbox Dash x McLaren partnership is a powerful way of communicating what’s possible in AI workflows, and we wanted a site that showcased that in an engaging, but clear way.”
Building a Cinematic, AI-Forward Experience
From the start, the site needed to feel like Formula 1: fast, precise and beautifully engineered.
On the surface, it’s a one-scroll page. Under the hood, it’s a carefully tuned system of motion, storytelling and performance.
“We really pushed Webflow on the custom side to achieve the level of motion we envisioned. The animations needed to be performant, fluid and fully coded into the experience — not just rendered files. Bringing that to life was a core part of what made this project so special.”
Many of the animations began their life in Blender, where the team crafted the core motion concepts before moving into implementation. Using Cursor alongside Blender, Daybreak Studio translated those sequences into performant native code that could run directly in the browser. Once integrated into Webflow, the team refined the interactions further, tuning for smoothness and efficiency. AI played a meaningful role in this workflow as well, helping accelerate the translation from 3D animation to web-ready code, allowing the team to focus on creating the best possible motion and then bringing it to life natively on the web.
Webflow’s flexible canvas and support for custom code meant they could marry that workflow with a smooth production process. Dropbox leveraged shared staging links to review motion and interactions in real time. Seeing the work directly in a live prototype, rather than static Figma frames, allowed the team to quickly evaluate whether animations felt right and to iterate with greater precision.
When the project pushed the boundaries of what was possible, the Webflow enterprise team also played a hands-on role. They experimented with solutions on their side, shared implementations back with the Dropbox and Daybreak Studio teams and helped unblock challenges around custom code or emerging ideas that hadn’t been tried before. This collaborative loop enabled the teams to stretch Webflow’s capabilities and refine the experience to a higher level of craft.
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Results on the Board
While the primary goal was brand elevation, the site still needed to perform under real campaign conditions, and it did.
The page supported solid campaign volume, pulling in roughly 45,000 sessions between June and September, and staying stable through major paid traffic spikes. During key social moments, the site handled large surges gracefully, even with intricate animation logic running in the background.
Internally, the work helped reposition Dropbox in the minds of both customers and the broader creative community.
“For many people, Dropbox is still synonymous with cloud storage, so this partnership was a chance to show how much more we’re becoming, especially as we step into AI-powered workspace tools,” said Bijan Rafie-Tari, Senior Brand Producer, Dropbox. “Working with Daybreak Studio on Webflow’s AI Website Experience Platform let us express that evolution in a really compelling way. And for designers and marketers, two of Dropbox’s most influential audiences, the site became a reference point for how narrative, motion and premium craft can reshape brand perception.”
For Dropbox and Daybreak Studio, Webflow has become a foundation for advancing what’s possible in web-based storytelling. It gives teams the flexibility to experiment, push creative and technical boundaries, and still deliver high-performance experiences at scale. The Dropbox Dash × McLaren F1 team sponsorship page built on that momentum, showing how thoughtful design, custom motion and a collaborative workflow can elevate a narrative far beyond the constraints of traditional web tooling.
See the partnership in action at dropbox.com and learn more about how Webflow can improve your website performance at webflow.com.
