A named team
The same senior people, in your timezone, who know why the store is built the way it is.
RETAINERS, LANDING PAGES AND DAY-TO-DAY DEVELOPMENT
Launch is the midpoint
A named team, agreed response times and a roadmap reviewed every month. Most of our clients have been with us for years rather than projects.
IN SHORT
- Retainers are fixed monthly blocks of senior development hours, month to month, with no long lock-in.
- The same team that built your store runs it afterwards — handover to a separate support team is where quality usually drops.
- Work is planned against a roadmap reviewed monthly, not pulled from a ticket queue by whoever shouts loudest.
- Unused scope rolls into the next cycle rather than being quietly billed and forgotten.
- Most of our clients have been with us for years rather than for a project.
What a retainer covers
Four areas, each with its own page.
Ongoing Retainers
A named senior team in your timezone, with agreed response times and a roadmap reviewed monthly.
Campaign & Landing Pages
Ongoing landing page production for brands shipping campaigns faster than a project cycle allows.
Maintenance & Theme Health
App audits, theme updates and the unglamorous work that keeps a store fast after launch.
Full Store Management
For brands without an in-house ecommerce team, we run the store day to day.
Launch is the midpoint
The agency model most brands have experienced goes like this: a project team builds the store, does good work, and then hands you to a support desk. The people who made the decisions are gone. The people answering your tickets have never seen the codebase. Every request starts from zero.
We do not do that. The people who built your store are the people who keep improving it. It is the single biggest reason our clients stay for years rather than for a project — not loyalty, just the absence of a handover cliff.
It also changes what a retainer is for. When the team already knows why a decision was made, the hours go into moving the business forward rather than re-learning the store every quarter.
How a retainer runs
Five stages. Stage three is what separates a retainer from a ticket queue.
- 01
Inherit properly
If we did not build the store, we start by auditing the theme, apps and integrations. A week reading what we inherited is cheaper than a year of guessing at it.
- 02
Agree the block
A fixed number of senior hours per month, sized against the roadmap rather than a guess. Bigger in a launch quarter, smaller in a quiet one.
- 03
Plan the cycle
At the start of each month we agree what the hours are going to: improvements, campaign work, fixes, technical debt. Written down, so nothing gets lost.
- 04
Ship in increments
Work lands continuously on a staging theme with preview links, not in one big release at month end.
- 05
Review against the numbers
Monthly: what shipped, what it moved, what is carried over, what changed in priority. The review drives the next cycle rather than reporting on the last one.
A roadmap, not a ticket queue
The difference in practice
A ticket queue is reactive. Work arrives, gets triaged, gets done in roughly the order it arrived. Everything feels busy and nothing compounds, because the important-but-not-urgent work never reaches the top.
A roadmap allocates deliberately. Some of each cycle goes to improvements against the numbers, some to campaign work, some to technical debt and maintenance — and urgent issues interrupt it rather than defining it.
The test is simple: if your agency has not shipped anything in six months that nobody asked for but everybody benefited from, you have a queue.
Retainer against ad-hoc work
| Retainer | Project by project | |
|---|---|---|
| Team knowledge | Continuous | Re-established each time |
| Response to urgent issues | Agreed path, same team | Depends who is free |
| Cost predictability | Fixed monthly | Quoted per piece |
| Small changes | Absorbed | Often not worth quoting |
| Technical debt | Budgeted into each cycle | Accumulates |
| Best for | Stores that keep evolving | One defined piece of work |
How we work with you
Month to month
Fixed monthly blocks with no long lock-in, scoped with you each cycle.
Roadmap reviewed monthly
Against the numbers, so the work is not simply whatever shouted loudest that week.
Honest about sizing
If hours keep rolling over, we reduce the block. A retainer you do not use is not a win for anyone.
Brands we run day to day
Wonderskin
Chicco
Chicco moved off Salesforce Commerce Cloud onto Shopify. The same team has handled landing pages and maintenance since launch.
Grays
Mighty Jaxx
Wonderskin, Chicco, Grays and Mighty Jaxx all run ongoing work with us — landing pages, maintenance, development and in some cases the whole store. See the full client list.
Retainer questions
What is included in a Shopify retainer?
A fixed monthly block of senior development hours covering improvements, fixes, campaign work, maintenance and the roadmap review. Scope is agreed with you at the start of each cycle rather than assumed.
Is there a minimum contract?
No. Retainers run month to month. We would rather be kept because the work is worth it than because of a notice period.
What happens to unused hours?
They roll into the next cycle. If they keep rolling, that is a signal the block is sized wrong and we will say so and reduce it.
Do you take over a store another agency built?
Often, yes. It starts with an audit of the theme, apps and integrations so we understand what we inherited before changing anything.
What are your response times?
Agreed per retainer, with a separate path for anything genuinely urgent — a broken checkout is not a ticket that waits for the next planning cycle.
Related
Just migrated or launched? A retainer is the natural next step — see migration and build. If the goal is specifically moving conversion numbers, that is optimization.
NEXT STEP
Month-to-month retainers
Fixed monthly blocks of senior hours, no long lock-in. The people who built your store are the people who keep improving it.