We’re excited to welcome Squashed Pixel as a new Top Drawer partner

Squashed Pixel is a Shopify eCommerce agency helping ambitious brands get more from their online stores. Working with Shopify since 2009, their small but experienced team helps brands with everything from design and development to migrations, UX, CRO, POS and ongoing growth. They believe working with an agency shouldn’t feel complicated. No unnecessary jargon, no smoke and mirrors - just experienced Shopify people who genuinely care about getting it right.

We caught up with the team to learn more about their journey, values and advice for brands looking to grow in today's retail landscape.

Squashed Pixel started back in 2009, which feels like a very different internet ago!

Tom started the business with a background in design and development, at a time when eCommerce was only just beginning to become accessible to smaller, independent brands. I joined a couple of years later, bringing more of the project, operations and client side into the business.

We discovered Shopify relatively early and could immediately see what it could do for growing brands. We became Shopify Experts and have essentially grown up alongside the platform ever since.

What started as a small web business has evolved into a specialist Shopify agency, but the principle behind it hasn’t really changed: do good work, be straightforward with people and genuinely care about the businesses you’re working with.

Trust is the biggest one.

There’s a reason we use the line “Not an agency. An ally.” We never want to be an agency that disappears after launch or recommends something simply because it creates more work for us.

We believe in being honest, practical and easy to work with. Sometimes that means challenging an idea, sometimes it means telling a client they don’t need to spend money on something, and sometimes it means being the calm person in the room when business inevitably throws up a problem.

We’re a small, experienced team and we care about doing things properly, without making the process unnecessarily complicated.

Seeing the brands we work with grow.

A website launch is lovely, but the really satisfying part is what happens afterwards - seeing conversion improve, watching a brand reach its next milestone or hearing that something we changed has made life easier for the people running the business.

We work with brands for years, so you become genuinely invested in them. You know their team, their challenges and what they’re trying to achieve next.

That long-term relationship is a huge part of what motivates us.

We don’t have products in the traditional Top Drawer sense - our product is our Shopify expertise.

And much of what we offer today has been shaped by listening to the brands we work with.

Over the years, we realised that brands rarely need just a new website. They need someone who understands the commercial side of eCommerce too - customer journeys, conversion, integrations, international growth, B2B, POS, warehousing and all the hundreds of decisions that sit around the technology.

Our services have evolved around those real-world challenges rather than us creating a fixed list of things we want to sell.

There have been lots, but still being here and loving what we do after 17 years is something we’re incredibly proud of.

We’ve worked with more than 800+ brands during that time, watched Shopify grow from a relatively unknown platform into what it is today, and built a team of genuinely brilliant people around us.

But some of the best moments are actually quite small ones - seeing a client we worked with when they were a startup become a major brand, receiving an email telling us a change has transformed their sales, or having someone come back to us years later because they trusted the experience they had with us the first time.

Those things mean a lot.

Don’t wait for everything to be perfect.

We see brands spend huge amounts of time worrying about having the perfect website, perfect packaging or perfect launch when the most useful thing they can often do is get something good in front of real customers and start learning.

Your customers will very quickly tell you what works.

At the same time, invest in the foundations. Understand your numbers, own your customer data and choose technology that can grow with you.

And surround yourself with people who will tell you what you need to hear, not just what you want to hear. A good partner should challenge you.

We won't be launching a collection - but we will be bringing something arguably more useful if you're running a Shopify store!

As a Top Drawer partner, we're available to talk all things Shopify and eCommerce with exhibitors and visiting brands.

Whether you're wondering why your conversion rate has dropped, considering moving to Shopify, struggling with an integration or simply want a second opinion on your store, get in touch.

No hard sell and no obligation. Just practical advice from people who've been doing this since 2009.

As a service business, we don’t have a new collection in quite the same way, but if we had to pick a favourite part of what we do, it would be the ongoing work we do with brands after their Shopify store has launched.

We’ve become increasingly focused on helping brands get more from what they already have - improving conversion, customer experience and performance rather than assuming the answer is always a new website.

For us, that’s where things get really interesting. 

Small, considered changes made consistently can have a much bigger impact on growth than one huge redesign every few years.

For us, sustainability is partly about being conscious of how we operate, but it's also about helping brands make better use of what they already have.

We're a small team and operate predominantly digitally, keeping unnecessary travel, printing and physical resources to a minimum.

From a client perspective, we're also big believers in improving rather than automatically replacing. A brand doesn't necessarily need a completely new Shopify store every few years. 

Often the more responsible, and commercially sensible, approach is to optimise the existing site, remove unnecessary apps and technology, improve performance and build on what's already working.

We try to take the same approach to our own business: keep things lean, make considered decisions and avoid doing something simply because it's the latest trend.