About us
70+ years inside ecommerce operations. 15 businesses. Both sides of the table.
Ten brands. Two SaaS platforms. A 3PL, a development agency and a bank.
Most fast-growth brands are led by product and branding people, not back office experts. The front end gets the attention and the investment; the systems underneath get whatever's left. That works until the spreadsheet holding it all together needs its own owner.
We've seen this from every seat in the room
Most consultancies have sat in one.
- Inside the brand.
- Gymshark, Acne Studios, Burberry, Louis Vuitton, AllSaints, Reiss, Joseph, Debenhams, Oh Polly and Currys. Not advising them, working in them, on the hook when something broke the week before peak.
- Inside the software vendor.
- Patchworks and HighCohesion, both co-founded by us. We know what a roadmap commitment is worth and which questions a vendor hopes you won't ask.
- Inside the 3PL.
- Bleckmann, on the warehouse floor and then running client integrations. The reason we don't take a fulfilment partner's word for what's possible.
- Inside the agency.
- Juno, building and breaking Magento when it was the largest ecommerce platform in the world.
- Inside the bank.
- Barclaycard, on the payments side, back when accepting a card online was still a project.
When someone tells you a piece of work is straightforward, somebody here has already done it.
Dom & Maxime
The people who ran the back office of a unicorn
Dom
Maxime
When Gymshark took investment at a $1bn+ valuation, the systems holding it together, ERP, warehouse management, returns, the integrations between fourteen storefronts and six global warehouses, were run by around twelve people.
Maxime built that team. Dom was its fifth member.
Most brands we work with are trying to do a version of what Gymshark did. Two of the people who did it are on the delivery team, not in the pitch.
- $1bn+
- Gymshark valuation at investment
- Twelve
- People running the systems behind it
Amy
Six fashion businesses, one product critical path
Amy has followed the same path in all of them, budget, range architecture, pricing and size curves, allocation, trading, markdown, exit, through Debenhams, AllSaints, Reiss, Joseph, Burberry and Acne Studios. Different terminology each time, different systems, the same underlying sequence.
She's fluent in all three parts of it: merchandising, planning, and the data underneath, from SAP through to custom BI.
When she joined Acne Studios there was no planning function at all. She built one from nothing.
LUKE & ANDY
They built the integration platform. Twice.
Luke and Andy met on opposite sides of a payments deal. What they kept coming back to was how often integrations broke the moment something upstream changed.
That became Patchworks in 2014: three people to over twenty, automating data for 20m+ transactions at peak. Then HighCohesion in 2019, the same problem again, this time with the room to build it from first principles.
Building the platform teaches you how data moves between systems. Delivering inside brands teaches you what happens when it doesn't.
LAUREN
She started on the front end and went looking for what sat behind it
Lauren joined Oh Polly in 2020 as a digital marketing executive on Bo+Tee and left five years later as Head of Ecommerce, running trading, digital experience, web development and more across Shopify Plus storefronts in several markets.
In between she was Product Owner for both brands, which meant owning the integrations, the agency retainers and the development work behind them. Growth on the front end kept arriving at the same constraint underneath it.
She now runs Commerce Thinking's operations and delivery as General Manager. Most of the brands we work with are at the point Oh Polly was, growing faster than the systems holding it together.
- 5+ years
- Inside two fast-growth brands
- Digital Exec to Product Owner to Head of Ecommerce
- Cross-functional experience and ownership
30+ businesses since
Plus a handful we're not able to name.
What we don't do
We don't build your website. We don't run your ads. We don't sell you software and then bill you to implement it.
We work on the part nobody puts in a case study: product data, ERP, warehouse and POS systems, integrations, and the operating model and people running them. Unglamorous, and the difference between growth compounding and growth stalling.