The studio
We're small on purpose. Senior engineers across the US, EU, and Gulf. We work with a handful of brands a year, deeply, and we stay with them. This is what that looks like up close.
The story
Klaver started in 2021 as a single engineer doing freelance Shopify work for a beauty brand in Paris. Within a year, the engagement had grown into a full retainer relationship — and three other brands had asked for the same arrangement.
That's when we made the choice that defines the studio: stay small. We hire one senior engineer at a time, only when an existing partner has needed work we couldn't ship without help. There's no sales team. There's no junior bench. There's just a small group of engineers and one designer, who all do the work and answer the phone.
Today we work with around a dozen brands at a time across the US, EU, and Gulf. About two-thirds are on retainer; one-third are project-based. None of them are pitched — every partnership starts as a referral or a discovery call from someone who read a piece we wrote.
What we believe
We will never grow into a 200-person agency. Above ~10 senior engineers, the calculus inverts: the overhead of managing the agency starts costing partners more than the agency adds. We stay where the math still works for the partner.
Every line of code we write will be read by someone who isn't us. Probably under pressure. Probably during an outage. We write for that reader, not for the one who's paying us today.
The discovery call is where we say no to work that isn't ours to do. If your problem isn't a fit, we say so and route you to someone better. We've sent partners to other shops, to in-house hires, to platform changes. Trust compounds; transactions don't.
Most agencies talk to founders. We talk to operators — the people who run inventory, fulfillment, growth, CX day to day. They're who lives with what we ship. The CMO writes the check, but the ops lead writes the support ticket.
Speed is the feature most websites omit because their agency couldn't measure it. We benchmark before, after, and quarterly — and we put performance budgets in CI so the work survives us.
If a partner can't understand what we built, we built the wrong thing. Every engagement ships with a runbook, a Notion roadmap your team has read access to, and an onboarding session for the people who will inherit the work.
05 / Why founder-led matters
Klaver is founder-led on purpose. The person on the strategy call is the same person scoping the work, reviewing the PRs, and answering at 9pm when something goes sideways during a Q4 push.
That's a structural choice. We will never grow into a 200-person agency where you get bumped to a junior PM after the contract closes. We stay small, hand-pick our partners, and ship like the brand is our own.
Tiny team. Senior only. No juniors farmed out.
9 yrs Shopify · ex-Plus Partner lead · ships code, not slide decks.
The team
Senior engineers and one senior designer. No juniors farmed out, no project managers between you and the work. When you ask "who built this?" — these are the people.
Studio lead · Plus engineering
Nine years on Shopify. Ex-Plus Partner lead. Has migrated a brand off six different platforms (so far). Codes in Liquid before coffee.
Apps · Integrations
Eight years building Shopify apps. App Bridge, Polaris, Shopify Functions in Rust. Once shipped a NetSuite integration during a power outage.
Storefronts · Performance
Hydrogen + Liquid. Six years on Shopify, before that at a Plus Partner agency in NYC. Owns the Lighthouse CI pipeline that won't let perf regressions ship.
Storefront UX · Design systems
Design lead on six Plus rebuilds across the GCC. Figma, Storybook, accessibility. Believes design is a load-bearing part of engineering.
02 / Why operators pick Klaver
None of these are "values on a wall." Each one is a structural choice we made about how this studio runs — and why partners stay with us for years.
The person scoping the work is the same person reviewing the PRs and answering when something goes sideways during a Q4 push. No farming out to people you'll never meet.
No juniors learning on your storefront. Everyone touching your code has shipped Shopify Plus at scale. We stay small on purpose so we can stay senior.
We scope by deliverable, not timesheet. Conversion lift, page-speed targets, integration uptime — we tie work to numbers your CFO actually cares about.
Strategy, design, and engineering under one roof. The team that scopes the work is the team that ships it — and the team that maintains it on retainer.
Code reviewed, documented, performance-tested. The next person who touches your store — even if it isn't us — should thank us.
US, EU, and Gulf coverage with senior-team overlap on every working day. Launch windows, on-call for retainer partners, and Friday-night Q4 cutovers without the hand-off chaos.
None of this is hourly work. It's a partnership.
Where we are
Senior team distributed across timezones so launches and Q4 cutovers don't depend on one person being awake.
Region
Berlin · Paris · Amsterdam
GMT+1 · GMT+2
Region
New York · Denver
GMT-5 · GMT-7
Region
Dubai · Riyadh
GMT+3 · GMT+4
Talk to us
We don't pitch on calls. We listen, learn your stack, and tell you whether we're the right team. If we're not, we'll point you at someone who is.