Shopify stores that earn the click, the cart, and the reorder.

Yes — roughly 35% of our Shopify work is built for other agencies, brand studios, and consultancies under NDA. Three partnership models: white-label (your brand, our engineers, fully invisible), agency-of-record (a dedicated Shopify pod working as your in-house capacity), and capacity overflow (sprint-by-sprint engagement when your in-house team is full). Code ownership transfers to your repos. Time zones overlap with the UK, EU, and US workday. We work in your tooling — Slack, Jira, Linear, ClickUp, Asana — as standard.

Our entire Shopify engineering team is based in Noida, India — 40 people in our iThum Tower B office, founded in 2015. We work with D2C brands and agencies across the UK, US, Ireland, Australia, the UAE, Germany, and the Netherlands. Working hours overlap with UK mornings (your 9 AM to noon), the full EU workday, and US afternoons (your 1 PM to 6 PM EST). For agency partners we run in their tooling — Slack, Jira, Linear, ClickUp, Asana — as standard.

Choose Shopify if you want operational simplicity, fast time-to-launch, the Shop Pay mobile checkout, and a mature app ecosystem; you have no in-house developer; and your business is a standard D2C catalogue. Choose WooCommerce if content marketing is a meaningful acquisition channel, you need deep customisation outside Shopify’s app ecosystem, or you have engineering capacity and want lower total cost of ownership at scale. Both platforms can win — the answer depends on whether your store is a brochure-with-checkout or a content-led editorial business.

Custom Shopify builds range from small D2C launches through to multi-region Plus implementations and headless Hydrogen storefronts. The right scope drivers are catalogue complexity, custom functionality, integrations, custom apps, performance targets, and how much of the editorial workflow needs to be built around how the merchandising team actually works. We scope every engagement against the brief and are honest about which features can wait until phase two.

A typical custom Shopify store takes 6 to 12 weeks from kickoff to launch. D2C catalogues with 50 to 200 SKUs and standard functionality land closer to 6 to 8 weeks. Plus implementations with custom checkout, B2B, or complex subscriptions land closer to 10 to 14 weeks. Headless Hydrogen builds add 4 to 6 weeks because the storefront is a separate engineering effort.

Yes — every store we ship hits sub-1.5-second storefront LCP, sub-0.05 CLS, and a Lighthouse mobile score above 90. We achieve this through custom themes (no installed-theme bloat), tight app discipline (10 to 15 apps maximum, not 40), AVIF / WebP images, Liquid template optimisation, and proper script deferring. Performance is part of the build, not an afterthought.

We build custom themes for serious D2C brands and Shopify Plus stores. Installed themes (Dawn, Sense, Crave, Impulse, Prestige, Empire) are excellent for fast launches but ship with 300 to 600 KB of CSS and JavaScript even on pages that use 10% of the theme’s features. A well-built custom theme ships 60 to 80 KB total and converts measurably better on mobile. For early-stage brands launching their first store, we sometimes recommend starting with Dawn or a paid theme and rebuilding custom later — we’ll be honest about which choice fits your stage.

Yes. WCAG 2.2 AA is our baseline on every Shopify build — colour contrast checked per token, keyboard navigation tested per template, screen-reader landmarks audited, form labels reviewed, focus states on every interactive element. Accessibility is part of the build, not a fix after launch. Required in regulated sectors (public sector, financial services, healthcare), increasingly required by major retailers’ supplier compliance, and rewarded by Google’s ranking signals.

Yes. We build with Hydrogen + Oxygen for clients who need React-grade storefront UX (configurable products, dynamic bundle builders, AR try-on), sub-second LCP for content-led D2C, or multi-channel commerce serving the same catalogue across web, mobile, kiosks, and B2B portals. For about 75% of brands asking us about headless, standard Shopify with a custom theme and tight performance work delivers the same outcomes at half the cost. We tell you honestly which architecture serves your case better.

Yes. We have built Plus stores across fashion, beauty, food and beverage, wellness, and home goods. We handle Plus-specific work — Checkout Extensibility (the replacement for legacy checkout.liquid), Shopify Functions for cart and discount logic, B2B implementations with company accounts and tiered pricing, multi-store management, and Plus-tier app development. For clients evaluating whether they need Plus, we will walk through the tier-decision honestly — Plus is roughly an order of magnitude higher monthly fee than standard Shopify, and it makes sense above roughly one to two million annual GMV when the checkout-customisation and B2B features become real costs.

Yes. We routinely migrate stores from WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, custom-coded platforms, and older Shopify stores onto modern Shopify or Shopify Plus. The migration covers product catalogue, customer data, order history, URL structure with proper 301 redirects to preserve SEO, theme rebuild, app re-selection, and editorial workflow design. Typical migration: 8 to 14 weeks depending on catalogue size and customisation depth. We have done this many times — we will tell you on the discovery call whether migration is the right call versus optimising what you have.

Yes. We offer monthly Shopify maintenance retainers covering app updates and curation, theme performance monitoring, Core Web Vitals tracking, accessibility regression checks, security and PCI compliance verification, backup verification, uptime monitoring, and a fixed allocation of editorial and development hours per month. For D2C brands without a dedicated Shopify engineer in-house, this is how the store stays healthy past month one and continues to convert.

Yes. We routinely inherit existing Shopify stores and bring them up to standard — performance audit and seven-fix engagement, app rationalisation, theme audit or rebuild, accessibility audit, checkout optimisation, and an editorial workflow the merchandising team can actually use. Inheriting a store is faster than rebuilding and is usually the right call unless the existing theme is fundamentally broken or the brand is genuinely repositioning.