Space 48 ‘Braves the Skies’ with the acquisition of a Shopify Plus agency

Space 48, a leading UK ecommerce agency has acquired Brave the Skies, a Shopify Plus agency to add to its portfolio of eCommerce brands. 

Space 48’s holding company, Dark Matter Commerce, has acquired Brave the Skies, a Shopify Plus agency.. The acquisition builds out Space48’s existing Shopify capabilities allowing it to provide solutions for brands and merchants at an earlier stage on their eCommerce journey and support them with additional services as they grow. Dark Matter Commerce was set up in 2021 when Space 48 received investment from private equity firm Foresight Investments. 

Brave the Skies will keep its brand identity, company culture and ways of working and will sit beside Space 48 under the umbrella company Dark Matter Commerce. The plan is to take Brave the Skies from where they are now on a growth journey to becoming one of the top-tier Shopify agencies in the UK with the support and expertise of the leadership team within Space 48 who has already gone on its own exponential growth journey over the past few years.

Since the investment by Foresight in 2021, Space 48 has gone from strength to strength. It has grown by 30% by hiring new talent, winning new household name clients, and bringing on new technology partners. This transformation was recently recognised as the business ranked 17th in the 2022 edition of Prolific North Top 50 Digital Agencies.

In the last 12 months, Space 48 has grown from 40 to 106 employees, which now grows to 121 people with the addition of the Brave the Skies team. The business launched three specialist eCommerce practice areas to meet the wide-ranging needs of its diverse client base. The eCommerce Consultancy offering provides strategic and client advisory consulting for online brands. The Performance Marketing arm develops clients’ customer acquisition and retention strategies, supporting data, reporting and commerce technology enablement. The Commerce Experience Design team provides UX and UI design as well as conversion rate optimisation and user research services. These recently launched practices sit alongside Space 48’s long-standing ecommerce platform development services including BigCommerce, Magento and Shopify Plus. 

Jon Woodall, Managing Director of Space 48, says, “Acquiring Brave the Skies represents the second acquisition in our strategy to create a portfolio of exceptional eCommerce brands. I’m excited to have the opportunity to work with the Brave the Skies team and recognise the great brand that they’ve already created in the industry and just love the fit with our existing brand names! Many of the foundations are in place to see them grow over these next few years, and I’m thrilled to be a part of that journey”

Lucy Roberts, Managing Director of Brave the Skies, says “The Crew at Brave the Skies and I are incredibly excited to have the opportunity to join Dark Matter Commerce and work alongside the Space 48 team. We share a lot of core values with Dark Matter Commerce, including a strong focus on Crew and Client Experience alongside striving for excellence in our fields of eCommerce. I feel very privileged to be surrounded and supported by such a talented Crew of individuals at Brave the Skies and with the involvement of Jon, Hannah and the Space 48 team I look forward to seeing what the next leg of our flight path holds.”