Allies acquires local Shopify experts Brave the Skies

From 1st November 2016, we now officially support the fast growing Shopify ecommerce platform following the acquisition of the York based Shopify experts, Brave the Skies.

The team will join Allies at our Barleycorn Yard office as a dedicated Shopify team with further expansion as we look to hire more designers and developers in the coming weeks and months.

About Brave the Skies

Brave the Skies has been working with Shopify since 2014, since then they have become esteemed official Shopify Experts. Originally set-up by designer and developer Marc Jarratt to help new businesses launch into the world. A mission we share here at Allies.

Marc, founder of Brave the Skies said,

Brave the Skies, Shopify and Allies are a super match. I can't wait to see what we can achieve together.

What is Shopify?

Shopify is a cloud based, fully hosted and maintained ecommerce platform. It has quickly become the world leader in cloud ecommerce. Their online store and POS solutions are the go-to choice for new merchants, whilst their enterprise Shopify Plus platform is powering high-growth businesses such as MVMT watches and Kylie Jenner's wildly successful cosmetics range.

A quick summary of the things we like about Shopify:

  • Cloud based, so no worrying about hosting, security patches or upgrades
  • Massive portfolio of well built themes
  • It's quick to get up and running
  • It's easy to use
  • Quick and quality customer support directly from Shopify
  • Wide range of additional add-ons covering popular integrations and functionality

What does this mean for Allies?

We can launch quicker and cheaper than ever before

Shopify and it's cloud based infrastructure means we can very quickly and thus cost effectively launch new ecommerce websites. If we are utilising one of the many themes available for Shopify this could be from as little as £1,500.

We can partner with clients from the very beginning

Shopify is powerful, yet easy to use whilst offering low set-up costs, making it perfect for start-ups. Allies invests heavily in long-term relationships, helping our clients navigate growth. The earlier we can join you on that journey the better, we can add a lot of value at the start-up stage.

Shopify is often simply the right tool for the job

Shopify provides a really robust and out-the-box platform whereby you don't need to worry about hosting, security updates and upgrades. It can't do some things as well as other platforms and it can't be customised in the same way we can with Magento. However, a good proportion of the time it can do everything that is required, in those circumstances we simply want to offer the right tool for the job.

Ryan, CEO at Allies said,

It's a very exciting time for Allies. It's a very exciting time for ecommerce generally in fact. Ecommerce businesses are selling for big money (Dollar Shave Club sells for $1B, Jet for $3.3B and soon Honest for over $1B), crowd funding is allowing a wave of entrepreneurs to launch with little capital and buying online is showing rapid growth with WSJ reporting 51% of purchases via the web and Shopify is making it easier than ever to get up and running.

Shopify is a big part of the future of ecommerce and entrepreneurship, and now is the right time for us to form a tight partnership with a dedicated team, levering our rich ecommerce heritage.

Lift your head, brave the skies.