Business experience.
Digital imagination.
Flying Penguin grew out of running real businesses, understanding the daily challenges and building better ways to work.
Built by a business owner.
For business owners.
“I didn’t set out to build a digital agency. I spent 23 years trying to make real retail businesses work better, and learning what happens when the technology underneath them does not.”
Flying Penguin grew from that experience. Every website, app and piece of automation is shaped by the problems we have faced ourselves, from unreliable developers and conflicting plugins to rising subscriptions, hosting limits and losing control of the systems a business depends on.
We learned what to ask, what to own and what to avoid. Now we use those lessons to build simpler, stronger digital businesses for people who should not have to learn everything the hard way.
How we got here.
Twenty-three years of running retail businesses, commissioning technology, hitting problems and learning how to build better.
The first business
The bedroom
It started in a bedroom.
Garreth started his first retail business from a bedroom in 2003. There was no digital department, technical team or investment behind it. There was a product, a customer to serve and the need to make an online business work with whatever tools were available.
That meant learning every part of the job while doing it: finding products, answering customers, taking payments, packing orders and trying to build a website people could actually find and trust. The technology was never separate from the business. It quickly became the backbone of it.
The whole business
in the picture.
Choose a service for a quick look.
We start with the challenge, work through the options with you and build a prototype you can try before you commit.
Let’s build
what’s next.
15 minutes with Garreth, the founder.
He ran his own businesses before he built tools for them, so bring the messy version.