About Skyrocket
We build Webflow and Shopify websites. Our clients are established businesses that measure website success commercially: enquiry rates, conversion rates, sales. The specialisation is deliberate. A studio that only builds websites has no incentive to make a project bigger than it needs to be.
We have offices in Newmarket, Auckland and Arrowtown, near Queenstown. Most of our client work runs remotely, so location rarely matters. We work with clients across New Zealand and Australia.
Seven years. We have been building Webflow and Shopify sites since both platforms were worth building on, and we have stayed specialists the entire time.
Five specialists. The person you talk to in the initial conversation is the person building your site. There are no account managers sitting between you and the people doing the work.
Yes. We were among the first studios in New Zealand to build seriously with Webflow, and we have maintained certified partner status since. In practice that means earlier access to new features and direct support from Webflow when we need it.
Yes, a certified Shopify Partner. We build custom Shopify stores, and modified off-the-shelf themes, for established businesses that need their ecommerce to perform.
Yes. We work regularly with clients in Australia and occasionally further afield. Most projects run entirely remotely and that works well. If you are based outside New Zealand or Australia, get in touch and we can talk through whether it is a good fit.
Is It Right for Us?
Established businesses with a commercial problem their website is failing to solve. The revenue figure, typically three million dollars or more, is a rough guide rather than a hard filter. It is roughly the point at which a proper website investment starts to make financial sense. What actually connects every client is how they measure success: enquiries, conversions and sales, not aesthetics.
Rarely, and we will tell you upfront if we think the timing is not right. Startups often need a different kind of website than what we build well. The clients we do our best work for have a proven business, a real budget and a specific commercial problem they need the website to solve.
Services, ecommerce, B2B, trade. We are not defined by industry. The clients we work with are defined by how they think about their website: as a commercial asset, not a design exercise.
We hear this often. The most common complaints are: the brief expanded without warning, the timeline stretched, the cost blew out and six months after launch nothing had changed commercially. We start every project by understanding what the site needs to do before we design anything. The person you brief is the person who builds it. And we hand over a site you can actually manage without calling us every time something needs changing.
No. We build websites. If you need those services, we can point you toward people we trust, but we do not offer them ourselves. A studio that only builds websites has no incentive to make your project a vehicle for ongoing work.
Yes. We work within your brand system, or we can help develop visual direction for the website where that is needed. We do not offer broader brand strategy, but translating an existing brand into a strong web presence is something we do on most projects.
How It Works
With a conversation, not a brief template. We want to understand what the current site is failing to do, where visitors are dropping off and what they need to understand before they will contact you or buy. That conversation shapes everything that follows.
We look at what the current site is doing and not doing: traffic patterns, conversion data, where visitors leave and what they seem to be looking for. We talk to you about the commercial goals for the new site. Then we figure out what the site needs to do before we design a single page. Most studios skip this part. It is the part that determines whether the site actually works.
Most projects run between eight and sixteen weeks from kick-off to launch, depending on complexity, the number of pages and how quickly content comes together. We give a realistic timeline at the start and update it as the project moves. We do not pad timelines to manage expectations and then hit them as if it were an achievement.
Copy and imagery are the two things that most commonly slow a project down. We can help with both: we work with trusted copywriters and photographers and can coordinate that as part of the project. If you have existing assets you are confident in, we will work with those. Either way, it is worth raising early.
More than you might expect at the start, less as the project progresses. The discovery and strategy phase requires real input from you. The build phase mostly requires timely feedback on designs and content. Plan for two to four hours a week in the early stages, then less as things solidify.
We do not structure projects around revision rounds. We structure them around getting to the right outcome. Revisions become expensive when the brief was unclear at the start. The discovery process is designed to prevent that.
We train your team to manage the site properly before we hand it over. Not a 45-minute Zoom and a PDF. Actual training, tailored to the people who will be using it, until they are confident. You should be able to make content changes, add pages and update products without calling us.
Yes. Some clients launch a solid, well-built core site first and add to it over time. Others want the full scope delivered at once. We talk through what makes sense for your situation early in the project and structure the work accordingly.
Webflow
Webflow gives us more design control than any other CMS-driven platform without the technical maintenance overhead of something like WordPress. It is fast by default, the hosting is handled properly and non-technical teams can manage it without calling us every time something needs updating. For established businesses that want a site that performs and that their own team can run, Webflow is the answer.
WordPress is flexible and widely understood. It also carries significant ongoing maintenance overhead. Plugins conflict. Updates break things. Security vulnerabilities are common. Webflow is a closed, managed platform: no plugin ecosystem to maintain, automatic security updates and fast hosting included. The tradeoff is less flexibility at the extreme end, but for most established businesses that is not a meaningful constraint.
Squarespace and Wix are designed for people who want to build their own site quickly without technical knowledge. Webflow is a professional build tool with no meaningful design constraints. The sites look different, perform differently and require completely different expertise to build properly. They are not comparable in practice.
Yes. The technical foundation is solid: fast by default, clean markup and full control over everything Google cares about. What you do with that foundation, in terms of content and authority, is the variable. The platform does not hold you back.
Webflow hosts Webflow sites on their own infrastructure, which runs on AWS. It is fast, reliable and includes SSL, a global CDN and automatic backups. You pay Webflow directly for hosting. It is not marked up through us.
Yes. The site lives in a Webflow account that belongs to you. When a project is complete, we can transfer it fully. You are not locked into us for hosting, maintenance or anything else.
Yes. Webflow's hosting infrastructure scales automatically. Traffic spikes do not take the site down. We have built sites for clients running significant campaigns and the platform handles it without issue.
Webflow is not built for large-scale ecommerce. A few hundred products is fine; several thousand gets complicated and Shopify becomes the better tool. Complex web applications, booking systems and custom portals are also outside what Webflow does well natively, though integrations can extend the platform significantly.
Webflow integrates with most common business tools via Zapier, Make and native integrations: CRM systems, email platforms, booking tools, analytics and payment gateways. For more complex requirements, we assess what the platform can handle natively and what might need a purpose-built integration.
Shopify
Shopify is built to sell things, and it shows. The operational fundamentals are all handled properly out of the box: inventory, payments, tax, shipping. For established ecommerce businesses, that is a significantly stronger starting point than trying to retrofit a shop onto something that was not designed for it.
A Shopify theme is a template you purchase and configure. It looks like every other site using the same theme. A custom Shopify build is designed and built specifically for your business, your products and your customers. The conversion rate difference between a generic theme and a well-built custom store is material. Clean Collective saw a 103% increase in conversion rate after their custom Shopify build with us.
Shopify handles catalogues of tens of thousands of products without difficulty. Performance and usability at that scale depends on how the site is structured, but the platform itself is not the constraint.
Yes. Migration involves moving product data, customer records and order history, and carefully redirecting URLs so you do not lose search rankings in the process. It has real complexity and we manage it carefully. We have done it many times.
Shopify Payments is available in New Zealand and is the simplest setup. Shopify also supports PayPal, Afterpay, Laybuy and a range of other gateways. The right configuration depends on your customer base and average order value.
We can build custom Shopify sections, integrate third-party apps and connect Shopify to external systems including CRMs, ERPs and fulfilment platforms. Full custom Shopify app development is outside our scope, but most integration requirements do not need a custom app to solve.
Yes. Shopify Plus opens up parts of the platform the standard tier does not: the checkout itself, B2B pricing structures and more sophisticated automation. We have built on Plus for clients where that additional control makes a real difference to how the store operates.
Investment
We do not publish fixed prices because the scope varies significantly between projects. A Webflow site for a professional services business is a different project to a custom Shopify store with complex integrations. We give clear, detailed quotes after an initial conversation, so you know exactly what you are paying for before any commitment.
Design complexity, page count, CMS requirements, custom functionality and whether content production is included all play a part. The biggest single driver of unexpected cost is unclear scope at the start. That is why we spend time on discovery before quoting in detail.
Projects are typically structured with a deposit at the start and milestone payments tied to build stages. If you need a different arrangement, raise it early and we will find something that makes sense.
Because the people building it have done it many times before, the strategic work is done properly before a pixel is moved and the outcome is a site that does something real for your business. The alternative tends to cost more to fix.
After Launch
We offer ongoing support and maintenance retainers for clients who want us involved after launch. This covers content updates, technical maintenance and ongoing development. It is not mandatory. The handover process is designed to make you self-sufficient if you prefer to manage the site yourselves.
Smaller content changes can be made by your team after training. For larger development work, we handle it through a support retainer or as a separate quoted project. You will not be waiting two weeks to change a heading.
Yes, and we will make sure you can before we consider the project complete. Webflow and Shopify are both designed for non-technical teams to manage content. We structure the CMS around the way your team actually works, then train them on it properly.
That is normal. You can add content pages and CMS entries yourself once you are trained. For new sections that require design and development work, we quote those separately. Most clients find they need less help with this than they expected once handover is done.
The same way you do: enquiry rates, conversion rates, sales. We agree on what success looks like before the build starts. Post-launch we review the data together and assess whether the site is doing what it was built to do.
We do not offer a performance guarantee, and any studio that does should be questioned on it carefully. What we do is start with clear commercial goals, build toward them deliberately and track the results after launch. Heritage Saunas achieved a 4.6% enquiry conversion rate against a 2.7% industry benchmark. That came from doing the strategic work properly upfront, not from a guarantee.
Getting Started
Get in touch through the contact page. We will have an initial conversation to understand what you are trying to achieve and whether we are the right fit. If we are, we follow up with a detailed scope and quote. If we are not, we will tell you.
A sense of what the site needs to do, the approximate number of pages, whether ecommerce is involved, any integrations you are aware of and your rough timeframe. You do not need a complete brief. A conversation is enough to get started.
Usually we can start right away. It depends on our current workload. We are a small studio and we do not overcommit. If timing is important to you, mention it early and we will tell you honestly whether we can make it work.
A conversation, not a pitch. We want to understand your business, where the current site is falling short and what a successful outcome looks like. Bring whatever context you have. There is no formal agenda and nothing to prepare.
