I started Playceholdr with a fairly simple belief: an eCommerce agency should be able to deliver great design, great development and great project delivery.

All three. Consistently.

Having worked across development, project management, solutions architecture and the commercial side of eCommerce, I’ve seen how much each of those disciplines depends on the others. I’ve also seen projects where one strong area ends up carrying everything else.

I never really accepted that it had to be that way. Playceholdr is the business I started to put that belief into practice.

Starting where things break

I started with a diploma in web development and a junior developer role at Moustache Republic. I was employee number ten. By the time I left, the business had grown to around fifty people, and I’m proud of the part I played in that growth.

But my starting point was writing code and answering support tickets.

It wasn’t particularly glamorous. A lot of it was painstaking work, especially before AI coding tools were around. You had to dig through the code, work out why something was behaving the way it was, and keep investigating until you understood it well enough to fix it. There wasn’t much room to bluff your way through. Either you understood the problem and resolved it, or the ticket stayed open.

At the time, I probably wouldn’t have described that as an opportunity. Looking back, I’m incredibly thankful that’s where I started.

There’s a depth of understanding you get from working directly with these platforms that’s difficult to acquire any other way. You learn how things fit together, where the limitations are, and how a seemingly small change can have consequences somewhere else. You also learn that what looks simple from the outside isn’t always simple underneath.

That foundation stayed with me as I moved into managing development teams, project management, and eventually solutions architecture and pre-sales. I could draw on the experience of having done the work myself when assessing a requirement, questioning an estimate or explaining a technical decision to a client.

It still shapes how I run Playceholdr. When someone proposes a solution, I want to understand why it’s the right one, what it depends on and what maintaining it will mean for the business. Years spent working through the details taught me which questions to ask.

 

Working with established retail brands

Agency life taught me extreme ownership. As the project manager, I considered the outcome my responsibility. Blaming someone else wasn’t going to recover a budget or get a launch back on track. The real skill was recognising where a project could go wrong and intervening ten steps earlier. That meant having the difficult conversations early and making sure the client and every stakeholder understood their responsibilities months before go-live. By the time the final month becomes chaotic, many of the decisions that caused it are already behind you.

During my time at Moustache Republic, I delivered projects including AS Colour’s migration from Magento to BigCommerce, and Bondi Sands’ Shopify migration and ERP implementation.

I also delivered projects for brands including Trade Depot, Vivo Hair Salon, The Sleep Store, Lighting Direct and Tile Space.

Those projects gave me experience with the complexity behind established eCommerce businesses. The storefront is one part of a much larger operation, connected to inventory, fulfilment, payments, customer service and the systems people use every day.

A decision made early in a project can have consequences well beyond the website. Something that looks straightforward in a design can be difficult to maintain. An integration that hasn’t been properly considered can create hours of manual work. A requirement that seems minor can turn out to be fundamental to how the business operates.

That’s still a big part of how I approach projects today. I want the important requirements understood and the uncertain parts explored before everyone has committed to a scope, budget and timeline.

Moving from agency life to Klarna

After Moustache Republic, I stayed in eCommerce but shifted into payments, joining the go-to-market team at Klarna.

Moving from an agency of around fifty people to a global fintech business was a significant change. It gave me a broader view of the industry and much more exposure to the commercial side of things.

Agency work had taught me how to deliver projects. Klarna pushed me to think more about how businesses evaluate an opportunity, where a product fits in the market and how to communicate its value.

That perspective matters because clients are investing in a business outcome. A new website, an integration or a custom feature is a means of getting somewhere.

Usually, that means growing revenue, reducing costs, improving efficiency or removing something that is holding the business back.

Understanding that goal should shape the recommendation from the beginning. It’s something I wanted to bring into Playceholdr alongside the technical and delivery experience.

The belief behind Playceholdr

Across my experience in the industry, including consulting and reviewing work from other agencies, I kept seeing a similar pattern.

An agency might have excellent designers, but struggle with development or delivery. Another might have very capable developers, but lack the design thinking or project management needed to make the most of them.

Often, one strong part of the business was compensating for weaknesses elsewhere.

From behind the scenes, it could feel like the client was rolling the dice. Would they get the experienced team? Would the project manager understand the technical requirements? Would the people assigned to the work have the support they needed?

The agency’s reputation might be strong, but the experience could vary considerably from one project to the next.

I don’t think clients should have to accept that uncertainty as part of hiring an agency.

They’re making a significant investment and trusting a team with an important part of their business. The agency has a responsibility to make the quality of that experience consistent.

That’s where Playceholdr came from: the belief that all the core disciplines can be strong, and that an agency can be built deliberately around making that happen.

Design, development and delivery

I think about those disciplines as the three Ds: design, development and delivery.

Design needs to represent the brand and make the store intuitive to use. It should help customers find the right products, understand what they’re buying and feel confident making a purchase.

Development needs to turn that experience into something reliable and maintainable. It takes judgement to choose the right approach, use the platform well and recognise when custom development is justified.

Delivery needs to bring everything together. That means clear scope, realistic planning, proactive communication and ownership of the decisions that keep a project moving.

Each discipline affects the others. A design decision has technical implications. A development decision can affect the customer experience. The way a project is managed determines whether those implications are discussed early enough.

For me, doing all three well starts with treating them as connected responsibilities throughout the project.

Clients shouldn’t be funding a trial run

I started as a junior developer, so I understand how important it is to give people opportunities to learn.

A healthy agency should develop its people. That requires proper support: supervision, review, clear expectations and work that matches someone’s experience.

The problem is when someone is given responsibility they aren’t ready for and left without enough guidance. The client then ends up carrying the cost through delays, rework or a result that falls short.

I don’t believe in trialling resources on the client’s dime.

It’s the agency’s responsibility to know who is ready for the work, where support is needed and how quality will be maintained. Resourcing pressure doesn’t remove that responsibility.

That’s a standard I want built into Playceholdr as it grows.

A team that cares about the whole result

The culture matters just as much as the individual skills.

I want people at Playceholdr to care about the success of the project beyond their own part of it. That means understanding how their decisions affect the rest of the team and being willing to raise a concern, help solve a problem or challenge an assumption.

When something goes wrong, the priority should be getting to the right outcome. A client gains very little from hearing which department technically caused the issue.

That shared responsibility is a big part of what a premium service means to me. Expertise matters, but so do care, communication and follow-through.

Delivering that service has a cost, and Playceholdr won’t always be the cheapest option. I’m comfortable with that, provided the value of the work justifies the investment.

Thinking like a consultant

I want every recommendation to start with an understanding of what the client is trying to achieve.

As a Shopify-first eCommerce agency, that often means looking closely at what the platform already does before proposing something custom. Sometimes the right answer is a bespoke feature. Sometimes it’s native functionality, a simpler process or leaving something out entirely.

The question should be whether the work will help the business enough to justify its cost and complexity.

That requires being willing to challenge a brief, explain trade-offs and recommend a smaller piece of work when that’s the better answer.

My goal for Playceholdr is to build an agency that clients can trust across the whole engagement. A team with the expertise to do the work well, the judgement to recommend the right work and the care to see it through.

That’s why I started it, and that’s the standard I want every project to reflect.