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Where to find Tom Locke:

Tom Locke - LinkedIn
Tom Locke - Instagram

Where to find Noughts & Ones:

Noughts & Ones - Website
Noughts & Ones - Instagram

Links Mentioned in Episode:

Patagonia
Finisterre
Know The Origin
People Tree
Twelve
Red Bank Coffee
Blossom Coffee Roasters
Contentful
Github
Netlify

Sponsor:

This podcast is sponsored by the MindfulCommerce Directory.

Shownotes: 

Krissie Leyland  0:00  

Hello, and welcome to the MindfulCommerce Podcast: a place where we talk to ecommerce brands, service providers and developers who care about protecting our planet. Today, we're talking to Tom from Noughts and Ones: a Shopify agency working with purpose-driven ecommerce brands who want to make a meaningful impact online. We love their advocacy for a better world, their passion for Shopify and sustainable commerce... and they're great to work with. And I know this firsthand! Hello Tom, welcome! Would you like to introduce yourself.

Tom Locke  0:42  

Yeah, so I'm Tom. I run an agency called Noughts and Ones in Bristol. And we're a web agency specializing in Shopify, working with ecommerce conscious brands, helping to make meaningful impact online.

Krissie Leyland  1:07
 
Nice. I love it. What are you up to at the moment? You didn't always have that focus on conscious brands and purely Shopify, did you?

Tom Locke  1:19  

No, early days, we started out doing actually quite a lot of custom Squarespace design and development. We started doing a bit of ecommerce on that platform but we always knew that other platforms are a little bit better when it came to the functionality for ecommerce brands. Shopify was something that we'd always wanted to really get stuck into. Then, it just happened semi-naturally, although it was definitely our plan. Now we focus pretty much entirely on Shopify and we've replaced Squarespace with an alternative web tech stack basically, that you're obviously very familiar with.

Krissie Leyland  2:11
 
Yeah, definitely. What was it that attracted you to Shopify, in particular? That Squarespace didn't have as much functionality, did you say?

Tom Locke  2:23  

Yeah, we were finding limitations from a development perspective. But also, we were starting to work with bigger commerce brands that needed more of their platform. Shopify, being a commerce-focused platform, just has a lot more strings to its bow. We were finding that it was a much better fit and we knew that in order to kind of serve those customers as an agency that Shopify was a much better fit as a platform.

Krissie Leyland  3:01  

I've used both and I much prefer Shopify. It's easy to use as someone like myself, who's not a developer, but then you can also use a lot of different technologies. You can code–do the geeky code stuff and scale. It's also quite simple and easy to use for maybe a brand owner that doesn't really know about the back-end and that kind of stuff.

Tom Locke  3:34  

For us as an agency, we were born out of working with a platform like Squarespace, which obviously, the idea is that anyone can make a website, upload content and that sort of thing. So our approach to Shopify development is very much focused on the actual kind of day-to-day usability. I guess that's something that has always stuck with us in terms of our approach is that: yes, we can build out really custom themes, but still maintain the actual usability on a day-to-day, on a content management level. Whenever we're building out a specific feature on a Shopify store, we're always trying to think about who's going to be in the seat–that's going to be using that eventually, which is generally going to be the merchant. So we try and build in any custom features within the theme editor itself. That's something that's super important for us.

Krissie Leyland  4:44  

Also, do you find that the App Store helps? I don't know what the App Store–if there even is an app store on Squarespace... but is that something that attracted you to Shopify as well?

Tom Locke  5:02  

Obviously, there's a whole host of additional features and functionality that you can plug into Shopify that, you know, at the time you couldn't in Squarespace, and now, it's still very much restricted. And certainly, for us as developers, having that kind of starting point for a particular feature... it just makes total sense to use an existing app as the basis and maybe, tweak it from there or get it to do what we needed to do, basically.

Krissie Leyland  5:32  

That's very cool. I wish I could do that. I do. I wish I could because I'm always like, "If only there was an app for this, this & this and I could just like tweak one or build one from scratch would be great."

Tom Locke  5:45  

I think with a lot of things, it'd be great if there was one thing that did everything. But inevitably, you've got to tweak things somewhere.

Krissie Leyland  5:54  

And then also, you've got to have a focus, haven't you? It's like you said, what's great about Shopify is they only focus on commerce. Whereas Squarespace, you know, they do everything... well, they say they do.

Tom Locke  6:10  

Sort of a catch-all type thing.

Krissie Leyland  6:12  

Yeah, which isn't always great. It's good to niche and get really good at one thing. Actually, on that note, so you have tweaked or shifted your niche a little bit. So we mentioned that you're focusing on working with purpose-driven brands, and do you want to talk a bit about that?

Tom Locke  6:37  

Yeah, it's felt like a real natural evolution for the agency. Ultimately, Noughts and Ones is built around the values of each and every team member. I have an amazing team that works at Noughts and Ones, and generally, they're just a passionate bunch of creative, lovely people. So, I think I've always wanted to shape the agency around the collective vision rather than just my vision as an agency owner. I think that's kind of something that's long been championed through our own values as individuals and now it's all kind of coming together, basically. It is super cheesy, but I said the other day that, "You know, it really feels like Noughts and Ones now is becoming the agency that it should be." So, we're always looking to do what we can do in a more conscious way. Despite the madness of the last–well, it's basically been a year now, hasn't it?–year (not that this is going to be podcast about COVID), I think it is really exciting to see ecommerce growing so significantly. Which, is very positive but I think that means that ultimately, there's a bigger opportunity for agencies and tech partners, to make sure that we're scaling with that growing ecommerce world to make sure that it's happening in a way that is as positive and meaningful as possible.

Krissie Leyland  8:39  

I love that. Yeah, definitely. That's what we're all about. I remember when we were first talking about it. It was like we both went down this rabbit hole at the same time. Do you remember?

Tom Locke  8:51  

Yeah, absolutely. We were–I feel like it was maybe almost a year ago, was it?

Krissie Leyland  9:00
 
I think, yeah–no longer.

Tom Locke  9:02  

Really?

Krissie Leyland  9:03  

Yeah. Anyway... I was so excited to talk to somebody who understood what I was talking about.

Tom Locke  9:11  

Yeah and I think it's certainly from us as individuals, but also a collective realization of the impact that ecommerce does have. Obviously, that coupled with how much it's growing as a result of things that are going on in the world. I think it was serendipitous that we connected, and as you say, went down that rabbit hole.

Krissie Leyland  9:40  

Like you said, ecommerce is growing but so is its impact and we need to do everything we can to lower that impact.

Tom Locke  9:50  

That's exciting, right?

Krissie Leyland  9:51  

Yeah!

Tom Locke  9:52  

It's a huge opportunity to start a conversation and make sure that sustainability in commerce and ec