Co-Founder
Luke Hodgson
The short version
Luke leads the calls that decide whether a brand's back office scales with the business or holds it back. He's the person founders talk to when they know something has to change and can't yet name what.
Before Commerce Thinking
Barclaycard → Patchworks (co-founder, COO then CEO) → HighCohesion (co-founder)
What Luke does
Luke leads on the calls that decide whether a brand's back office scales with the business or holds it back. He's spent the last 15 years filling the gap where a CTO should sit inside brands growing faster than their teams can keep up, working directly with founders and ops leads to turn "something needs to change" into a plan people can actually execute.
What Luke is looking for
The gap between what a system is supposed to do and what actually happens once volume explodes. Most transformation projects fail because nobody separates what the business genuinely needs from what it assumes it needs because that's how it's always worked. That's the call he gets brought in to make.
With Commerce Thinking
“Spent five years building the integration software brands buy. Has spent the seven since sitting on the other side of the table.”
The origin story
Luke started out selling card terminals to small businesses. The interesting part came later at Barclaycard, building partnerships with ecommerce platforms - which is where he met Andy, who'd built the Magento integration on the other side of the deal.
Their conversations about integrations that kept breaking became Patchworks in 2014. Five years, then a clean break: HighCohesion for the product, Commerce Thinking to fund it. COVID took most of the revenue almost overnight, and set the shape of the business ever since. Lean, expert, not chasing headcount.
Ask Luke about
→ Why the vendor's implementation estimate is always wrong
→ What a founder actually needs to decide, versus what they think they need to decide
→ Why CT stayed small on purpose
Work Luke has been part of
Where Luke works
Audit
Find out what's actually broken before you spend on fixing it.
View practiceERP
The back office system that runs the business, not the one that fights it.
View practiceProduct Ops
Make product data, launches and merchandising actually work end-to-end.
View practiceCommerce
Make Shopify work for the people running the business.
View practiceElsewhere
Start with an audit and we'll bring the right people to the table.
Contact