Sporting Saint began life with founder Pip Jones making gundog training aids in her farmhouse kitchen, often roping in friends with the promise of a glass of wine. It has since grown into a multi-million-pound nationwide operation based in Bromyard, rural Herefordshire, serving a broad customer base, including direct consumers, trade customers, clubs, wholesale buyers, and international distributors.

This growth put pressure on their business systems – at the time, a custom-built infrastructure that incorporated a website, accounts, stock management, and warehouse processes. Their accounting setup relied on Sage 50, with a brittle integration to the website that only functioned when a specific office computer was online. This complicated, single-site solution was difficult to maintain, expensive to extend, and increasingly fragile as the business grew. It also limited the business’s ability to scale or explore new sales channels. Time to explore options with eighteen73.

Rather than treating this as a straightforward website rebuild, we worked with Sporting Saint as technical consultants to build a more streamlined, connected architecture. As always, we began with a ‘discovery’ phase to understand how the business actually operates day to day; from production and stock control, through to trade pricing, fulfilment and customer service.

From there, we advised on a move to a fully cloud-based operational stack. Working closely with Sporting Saint, their accountants, and internal stakeholders, we supported the transition to Xero for accounting and Cin7 for inventory, production workflows and trade pricing. Cin7 now underpins how the business manages stock levels, production processes and complex pricing structures, and has been a significant improvement for both warehouse and office teams.

This modular approach replaced the previous all-in-one system with a decoupled architecture, allowing each part of the business to evolve independently, and each piece of crucial business software to do what it does best.

We recommended WooCommerce as the core e-commerce platform. For Sporting Saint, ownership and control were non-negotiable. WooCommerce gives the business full ownership of its platform and data, avoids ongoing platform fees tied directly to turnover, and allows deep, reliable integration with third-party systems such as Cin7. This level of control is essential when trade pricing, stock logic and operational workflows are central to the business.

By contrast, hosted platforms like Shopify are designed to be restrictive, to suit most users but less malleable for customers who want to flex to mirror the way they work.. They work well for straightforward retail, but become limiting when businesses need bespoke pricing models, complex back-office integrations, or freedom over how data and processes are handled. At Sporting Saints’ scale, those constraints would have introduced unnecessary costs, compromises, and long-term dependencies.

WooCommerce became the central storefront in a consciously decoupled ecosystem.

Beyond the initial rebuild, eighteen73 continues to support Sporting Saint across SEO, paid media and digital marketing.

We work on ongoing technical SEO improvements, competitor analysis and performance optimisation, ensuring the platform remains fast, crawlable and conversion-focused as content and traffic grow. More recently, we’ve carried out a UX and conversion rate review informed by a full year of real user data, feeding insights back into both the design and functionality of the site.

We’ve also supported offline marketing initiatives, including print campaigns, ensuring digital and physical channels work together coherently.

The year following the website’s relaunch was their busiest to date, and the combination of operational modernisation, a scalable WooCommerce platform and ongoing digital marketing support has helped Sporting Saint grow without technical bottlenecks.

Sporting Saint is a Herefordshire family farming business striving to be the best, manufacturing in the UK and continuously improving. They are clear-thinking, ambitious and pragmatic. They understand the value of investing in systems that support long-term growth rather than short-term fixes.

We work as integrated delivery partners, and this project is a strong example of how thoughtful technical decisions can transform not just a website, but an entire business operation.