An eCommerce development agency is set to hit £1 million turnover after becoming one of only 20 Shopify Plus Partners in the UK.
Manchester-based Rainy City Agency, founded and led by MD Rebecca Worsley, has been bootstrapped since inception in 2017 and never made a loss.
It specialises in providing creative, high performing websites in the health, beauty and lifestyle sector using the Shopify Plus platform. To date it has helped 500 brands ‘to succeed online’.
“We like to work alongside brands over the long-term as a proactive partnership on the lookout for opportunities in the market,” Worsley tells BusinessCloud. “We’re not just a regular ‘to-do list’ dev agency – we care about our brands and their growth.
“Last year we turned over £630k, which was double the turnover from 2020, and are on track to hit the £1m mark for 2022.
“We’ve never been through fundraising – it’s been totally organic growth and all self-funded. I’m not sure if we’ll go through fundraising in the future, but for now we’re good as we are.”
Projects consist of full website redesigns or replatforming over to Shopify from other content management systems. Following its successful application to the Shopify Plus Partners scheme, the agency will now benefit from referrals and quarterly performance insights, while high-end merchants will enjoy enhanced testing and demo services around new stores in development.
“It will allow us to target more health, beauty and lifestyle eCommerce businesses that want to scale up their operations, build their brand and take sales performance to the next level,” says Worsley, the only female founder in the Shopify Plus UK community.
She adds: “I am really passionate about bringing more women into tech – it’s a fantastic industry and needs to attract more female talent. We’re going to be putting a heavy focus on women in tech [as] our industry is very male dominated.”
Rainy City, named after Manchester’s notorious weather, is planning to bring events to the city’s tech scene to help change this.
“I’ve often been to events and been the only female there,” explains Worsley. “I want to encourage female entrepreneurs, coders, designers – everyone that works in our industry.
“Our team is actually made up of 10 females out of the 18 we have employed so we’re doing pretty well in terms of balance!
“There’s a lot of great talent and tech in the city, but we don’t have a big presence for Shopify and its merchants and that’s something we’re going to change.
“We’ll be hosting our first Shopify Meetup in Manchester city centre in the autumn – think amazing industry insights, AMA panels and of course a ‘happy hour’ for the chance to network and learn from each other!
“We’re hoping this is just the start for us and events and will really help us create a name for ourselves in the North West.”
Rainy City is also developing a Shopify theme which is expected to be finished and ready for purchase by October.
“It makes sense for us to branch into this – we work with the themes on a daily basis and know what our merchants’ pain points are with using them so we’re hoping this will be a great extension of what we already do,” says Worsley.
Silicon Valley takeover at London ‘digital shelf’ analytics firm