About Naughton & Bird

We are a specialist e-commerce consultancy and a Shopify Plus Partner, and we work on Shopify stores so they are discovery-ready: found in organic search, cited in AI answers, and read correctly by the shopping agents customers now send to buy for them.

Our founder has worked in e-commerce for nearly two decades, across the UK, Hong Kong, Dubai, and Australia, so when a brand sells into more than one of those markets we already know how retail and search differ between them.

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A lantern shop on a Hong Kong street as a red taxi passes

“The fundamentals of good retailing have not changed in seventy years. They are the same ones that make a Shopify brand grow today.”

Matt Naughton · Founder, Naughton & Bird

Three generations in retail

Who we are

A specialist e-commerce consultancy and Shopify Plus Partner

We keep the portfolio deliberately small, and the brands on it are established international names in jewellery, skincare, hospitality, niche fashion, knitwear, and baby. Every engagement is led by the people who do the work, and the strategy, the architecture, the build, the content and the Klaviyo programme sit with one team, so nothing is lost in a handover.

We are a Shopify Plus Partner and a Klaviyo Master Gold partner.

Matt Naughton founded the consultancy in Hong Kong in 2020, after a decade growing Lights4fun from a start-up into Europe's leading decorative lighting retailer. He had chosen Shopify for that business in 2016, before it was the obvious choice, because he needed a platform built for commercial operators. We now do for other premium brands what he learned to do for his own.

The name has older roots. The family business opened in Leeds in 1952, and the fundamentals that built it still shape how we work.

What we do

Shopify SEO

The architecture, entity signals and content that decide whether a store is found. The fundamentals come first, because a store that Google can read correctly is the baseline everything else builds on.

Shopify Agentic Commerce

Preparing stores for the AI assistants and shopping agents that now read them directly, so the brand is represented correctly wherever a customer sends their agent shopping.

Shopify Builds

Builds, replatforms and new themes, with the research done before design starts, so the store opens structurally right for search and ready to convert.

Klaviyo Strategy & Builds

The programmes that keep the customers discovery brings in: Klaviyo migrations, full setups, flows, campaigns and deliverability, shaped by the same immersion in the brand as the search work.

E-commerce Masterclasses

We teach what we practise, in sessions built around your store and your team, so the capability stays inside the business.

The name

Three generations in retail

Naughton & Bird shop, Headingley, Leeds, 1962

Naughton & Bird, Headingley, Leeds. 1962.

The name comes from a family retail business in Leeds, West Yorkshire, that opened in 1952, and a generation of trading there produced celebrity PR stunts, long-lost footage from the fifties, and a reputation built the slow way. Naughton & Bird is that name brought forward by the third-generation grandson, in a different form.

Seventy years on, the same fundamentals apply. You know your customer, you build a community around what you sell, you earn loyalty, and you do things properly. The family learned that across three generations of trading, and it is what makes a Shopify brand grow through organic search, because the brands that rank are the ones that have earned the right to be found.

Origin

The lesson that shaped everything

In 2008, organic search was emerging as a serious customer acquisition channel, and at Lights4fun the brands that understood how to be found online had an advantage that felt almost unfair. Their acquisition costs were lower, their customers were better, and their growth compounded instead of resetting every quarter. Matt has been building on that observation ever since.

Paid acquisition costs rise 10 to 20 percent a year while organic compounds, and AI search has not changed that logic so much as raised the stakes on the foundations underneath it. A brand with the right architecture and genuine authority pays nothing for the traffic an AI recommendation sends, and the surfaces that now matter are the ones that architecture opens up.

The Star Ferry crossing Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong

How we work

We leave every team more capable than we found it

We explain what we are doing and why as we go, so the understanding stays with your people and the work keeps paying long after the engagement ends.

Every recommendation has to answer one question before it makes the brief: what does this mean for the business? Rankings, schema and architecture all matter when they move something the business cares about.

Subject-matter specialists deliver the work, and where a brand needs something outside our own disciplines we bring in someone from our wider network. We have done every corner of e-commerce ourselves, from scaling a start-up to building a consultancy, and we help owners and brands make commercial decisions informed by that experience and a fanatical attention to detail.