The Store Is No Longer the Starting Point. For twenty years, ecommerce meant one job: get people to your website and hope they buy. That era is closing. AI agents now shop for the customer, researching, comparing, and checking out inside ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity. It's called agentic commerce, and Shopify has moved faster than anyone. Here's what changed, and why it matters for every brand we build.

Something Big Just Happened. Most Agencies Missed It. On March 12, 2026, Anthropic announced the Claude Partner Network — a $100 million program designed to support agencies and firms that help businesses adopt Claude at scale.

Something genuinely interesting happened to software development over the last two years. It got democratised.

What Is Ellomatt? Ellomatt is a DTC sleep brand built by The Blank Works Venture Studio. Not a client project, but a brand we conceived, funded, developed, and launched from factory to consumer. The name combines ello, like hello, the first thing you say when you wake up, and matt, for mattress: a brand that greets you every morning. Its real differentiator was the positioning: color. In a category dominated by white, Ellomatt arrived bold, considered, and emotional. Sleep is personal. It should feel like yours.

There's a £5 bottle of shampoo with googly eyes on it sitting in a Boots store on Pont Street, London. It was designed by one of Britain's most celebrated luxury accessories designers. And it sold out. We think about this a lot.

Most businesses don't have a growth problem. They have a prioritisation problem. They're doing some things well. They're ignoring others entirely. And the gap between where they are and where they could be isn't talent or budget — it's coverage. The channels, systems, and strategies that aren't being activated at all.

Every few months, someone publishes a piece declaring that Shopify is losing ground. To WooCommerce, to headless commerce, to whatever the platform of the moment happens to be.