6th Man

Based in Ghent, Belgium, 6th Man is a small Shopify-focused studio, founded in 2023, working with e-commerce businesses whose catalogs or requirements have outgrown a standard template or a single freelancer's capacity. Its client base ranges from smaller SMEs to retailers with large, complex SKU counts, including cross-border sellers dealing with multiple markets, currencies and languages. The team positions itself as an alternative to splitting Shopify development, SEO and CRO across separate vendors, arguing that this separation causes work to be lost at handoff. The agency's work covers three areas: building custom Shopify stores, growing existing stores, and migrating stores onto Shopify from other platforms. On the build side, it writes custom Liquid theme code aimed at fast page performance and a structure readable by search engines, and for large catalogs it starts by designing the underlying data model — how products, filters and templates relate — before development begins. For growth, it runs SEO and conversion rate optimization on stores it did or did not originally build, working in existing codebases. For migrations, it maps URLs before a move, carries over catalog, processes and customer data, executes cutovers without downtime, and monitors indexation afterward to protect rankings. Listed technical work includes Shopify theme and app development, full-stack application development, HubSpot email development, and a documented 100,000-SKU migration from Tilroy to Shopify.