Topiary E-Commerce LLP
Most accounts don’t need more. They need less, shaped better.
We are an e-commerce consultancy for UK retailers. Google Ads, SEO, email and CRO — four disciplines, run by the people who do the work.
The argument
After a certain size, the problem stops being effort and starts being sprawl.
Four thousand keywords nobody has reviewed since 2023. Nine email flows where three carry the revenue. A category template generating twelve thousand URLs Google has no reason to crawl. Every one of them was a reasonable decision at the time, and together they are why the numbers have stopped moving.
Large agencies are poorly built for this. Their model needs scope to grow, and the work here often means doing less on purpose — a recommendation that costs them the account. It is also senior work, and the person who sold it to you is rarely the person doing it.
Cutting is only half of it, and rarely the half that makes the money. The same sprawl that wastes budget also hides products that are already winning and are being starved by the campaign structure around them — capped, buried in a shared budget with fifty things that do not convert, or bidding against your own listings. Those are the lines we push hard, and the argument for spending considerably more on them is easier to make once everything around them has stopped competing for the money.
We are deliberately small. You get the people who do the work, and advice that is allowed to be “spend less here” — or “spend three times this much here”, which is the same discipline pointed the other way.
Who you would be dealing with
Advice from someone who has spent his own money on it
James Hickman founded Plumbworld in 1999 and spent the next twenty-three years growing it from a start-up into one of the UK’s largest online bathroom retailers. It was sold to the Highbourne Group in 2022.
For the early years he ran all four of these disciplines himself, on a start-up budget where every pound was his own — the ads, the search work, the email programme and the tests on the checkout. Later, once the business could afford agencies, he sat on the other side of the table and was sold to badly. Both halves of that turn out to be useful.
He does not need your retainer. That is not a boast, it is the mechanism: it is what allows the answer to be “spend less here” on the occasions when spending less is the right answer.
1999
Founded Plumbworld. Online bathroom retail from a standing start — ads, search, email and testing all run in-house.
2022
Sold to the Highbourne Group. Group online turnover across Plumbworld and Plumbnation approaching £150 million.
Today
Topiary E-Commerce — the same problems, in other people’s businesses.
Four disciplines, one operator
How we work in each →Paid
Google Ads
Paid search and shopping for retailers with real budget at stake, managed by the person who builds the account.
Organic
SEO
Technical, content and commercial SEO for large product catalogues, where template decisions matter more than blog posts.
Lifecycle
Email Marketing
Lifecycle and retention programmes: the flows that run every day, not the campaign that went out last Tuesday.
Experiment
Conversion Rate Optimization
Research-led experimentation on the journeys that carry your traffic, with results you can defend to a finance director.
How an engagement runs
01
Look at everything
Two to three weeks inside the accounts, the analytics and the data you already have. We come back with what is actually happening, including the parts nobody wanted to raise.
02
Decide what to cut
A written plan naming what stops, what stays and what gets built — with the commercial reasoning attached, so you can take it to a finance director without translating it.
03
Do the work
We execute against the plan, in your accounts, with your team. Not a strategy deck handed to a junior. The person who wrote the plan is the person running it.
04
Report honestly
Monthly, with the trading decisions written out and the things that did not work stated plainly. If a channel should get less of your money next quarter, we will say so.
Start with a review, not a pitch
Tell us where you think the problem is. We will look at the accounts and come back with what we actually found — including the possibility that you do not need us.