July 14, 2026 by Alex Massaad · 4 min read

What a Shopify Agency Looks Like From a Small Town in Ontario

Every few months a prospect asks, politely, where we actually are. The answer is Fergus, Ontario. A stone bridge over the Grand River, a Scottish festival every August, and a Shopify agency running out of a house on a side street. That last part surprises people, so here is what it looks like day to day, since it is the one thing no agency website ever shows you.

Two founders, one hallway

Victoria runs brand and design from one room. I run engineering from the one across the hall. The commute between the two is about a dozen steps, which is also roughly the distance a client’s feedback travels between “Victoria heard it on the call” and “Alex is already changing it.”

That sounds like a joke, and it partly is, but it is also the operating model. A lot of agencies have a wall between the people who talk to you and the people who build your store. Ours is a literal wall, and it has a door in it that is never closed. When a migration hits a snag at four in the afternoon, the design conversation and the engineering conversation happen in the same fifteen minutes, not across two calendars.

The rest of the team, ex-Shopify engineers and designers, is remote the way the rest of the industry is remote. Fergus is where the two of us happen to be, and where the kid’s cartoons occasionally leak into the background of a discovery call. Nobody has minded yet.

What the postal code does not change

The work is the same work. Migrations from WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce and Lightspeed. Custom apps, including ones that live in the Shopify App Store. Integrations with the ERP or the 3PL that the last agency said could not be done. Our clients are in Toronto, Vancouver, across the US, and in the UK, and most of them have never been closer to Fergus than the 401.

What the postal code does change is the overhead. A small town means we are not paying downtown rent, which means we are not chasing volume to cover it, which means we get to be picky about which projects we take. The people you talk to on the first call are the people who write the code, and that only works if there are not too many calls.

Geography helps in one concrete way: we are half an hour from Guelph and Waterloo and ninety minutes from Toronto, so kickoffs and big milestones can be in person across southwestern Ontario and the GTA when a client wants that. For everyone else, Eastern time means UK clients get our morning and the west coast gets our afternoon.

The boring infrastructure

Everything we build for clients runs somewhere else. The stores run on Shopify, the apps run on Gadget, the code lives on GitHub, the deploys run in CI. The house itself needs very little: two laptops, a decent monitor each, a good pair of headphones for the days a call and a cutover overlap, and an internet connection that never gets to be the story.

That last one took longer to sort out than it should have. Small towns in Ontario usually have one incumbent cable line and the same pricing dance everyone in Canada knows: sign up at a promotional rate, watch it quietly expire, call once a year to threaten to leave. I got tired of the dance. Earlier this summer I moved the house to oxio, a smaller Canadian ISP that runs on the same cable line at a flat price with no contract. It has been fine, which is the highest compliment you can pay an internet connection. If you are in the same boat, I wrote up the referral code and how to actually apply it on my personal site, and it gets you the first month free.

The fallback, for the record, is a phone hotspot. A client call has never had to use it, and I would like to keep it that way.

Why we stayed

We could have set up in Toronto. Plenty of Shopify agencies do, and there are good reasons for it. But most of what makes a small agency good at this work, quick answers, senior people on every project, the freedom to say no to the wrong fit, is easier to protect when the business is two founders in a house than when it is a lease and a headcount target.

So the answer to “where are you” is Fergus, and the follow-up is that it has not mattered to a single client yet. If you want to see whether it matters to you, book a call. We will be across the hall.