Co-Founder

Andy Slater

The short version

Andy sits between the business and the engineering, translating one into the other. He's the person who tells you the unglamorous fix is the right one.

Before Commerce Thinking

Juno → Patchworks (co-founder) → HighCohesion (co-founder)

What Andy does

→ Turns fragile processes into systems that hold under pressure

→ Integration patterns, data contracts, SKU logic, POS reality

→ Tells you what actually moves the P&L, having run a low-margin ecommerce business himself

What Andy is looking for

Most brands don't have a tech problem. They have a too-many-disconnected-tools-and-nobody-owning-the-architecture problem.

The fix is usually boring. Ship the thing that removes the risk, not the thing that looks clever in a deck.

With Commerce Thinking

“I just kept building things until they worked.”

Andy Slater

The origin story

Andy never went to university. Sixth form wasn't for him, so he taught himself to code - HTML first, then PHP. He landed an agency developer job, proved he could ship, then turned down the full-time offer to start an ecommerce business selling collectables with a friend instead.

Five years later he'd earned almost nothing. He'd also learned margin, turnover and systems the hard way, and automated everything he could stand to do twice.

Then years of Magento at Juno, where every third-party API change broke something he'd built. That patching cycle became the idea behind Patchworks: integrations shouldn't live inside the store. Three people to twenty in four years.

Andy's advice for founders and ops leads

01
Learn spreadsheets properly. The payoff is enormous and it transfers to any industry
02
Automate the button-clicking. If you've done it twice, don't do it a third time
03
Say yes before you're ready. You'll figure it out faster than you think
04
Bridge teams. Be the person who speaks both commercial and technical - every company needs one