Hart & Heim is an independent studio for businesses that have outgrown their tools. We design and build the products, platforms and commerce systems that run them, versioned and verified, and hand them over as something you own. Based in Sydney, working with clients anywhere.
Hart & Heim works across internal platforms, commerce, consumer apps and search, and builds them the same way each time: versioned, reviewable, verified against the live system, and documented well enough to hand over.
Internal tools and SaaS platforms that replace the spreadsheet, the shared drive and the script only one person knows how to run.
Dealer Portal: 36-dealer distribution network
Shopify architecture treated as software: version-controlled themes, real review workflows, and structured data that holds up under a parser.
Hi-fi storefront overhaul: 10 merged PRs, zero visual change
Marketing sites that are actually wired to the business. Live availability, real bookings, and an admin panel the owner can use unaided.
Hair Design by Lara: concept to launch in three weeks
Installable, offline-capable products that behave like native apps without the cost of maintaining two codebases.
Peeka: live billing, server-enforced entitlements
Automation built around a model rather than bolted onto one, with the failure modes, cost ceilings and refunds designed in.
Marketing Intelligence CLI: 17 audit modules, one command
Being found by Google and by the answer engines that increasingly sit in front of it. Verified against live pages, not assumed.
1,100+ structured content records normalised for AI search
Selected Hart & Heim projects: internal platforms, storefronts, consumer products and the automation around them, with the failures and the fixes included, because that is where the engineering actually lives.
Point a phone at an animal, tap once, and it speaks. A vision model reads the photo and writes two or three first-person sentences as that animal, built as an installable web app with real subscription and consumable billing behind it.
2026 – presentIn production
Client not named publicly. Happy to walk through it, and put you in touch, on request.
A Flask admin platform that replaced fragile, hand-run scripts with a safe, auditable way to distribute marketing assets across a 36-dealer retail network. Every change previewed before it runs and logged after it does.
2026Internal tooling
A client-agnostic command-line system that audits an entire Google marketing stack and layers model-driven analysis on top, turning days of manual auditing into a single command with a repeatable action plan at the end.
A predictive tool that tells Sydney and Melbourne rideshare drivers where and when to work, fusing weather, events, flight arrivals and traffic into a single live demand score rather than leaving them to guess.
A full-stack salon website wired directly into the salon's existing booking system: live services, live pricing and live availability, with a secure admin panel, delivered concept to launch in three weeks.
2026Shipped
Client not named publicly. Happy to walk through it, and put you in touch, on request.
A technical, performance and AI-search overhaul of a live Shopify storefront, from an unversioned theme to a reviewed deploy pipeline and a purpose-built generative-search layer, with zero visual change for customers.
2026Unpublished draft, awaiting stakeholder go-live approval
Client not named publicly. Happy to walk through it, and put you in touch, on request.
A ground-up rebuild of a long-established loudspeaker brand's storefront: a complete Online Store 2.0 theme built page by page and product by product, with a full structured-data layer designed for AI answer engines as much as for search.
2026Live
Client not named publicly. Happy to walk through it, and put you in touch, on request.
A full bug, UX and search audit of a live speaker-accessory storefront, followed by a homepage rebuild, a repository and deploy pipeline, and content written for fourteen collection pages that previously had none.
2023 – 2025
Client not named publicly. Happy to walk through it, and put you in touch, on request.
End-to-end management of two Shopify Plus brands, covering custom development, inventory integration, marketing automation and a substantial paid search budget, led from strategy through to implementation.
2026In build
A custom progressive web app replacing a third-party platform as the digital home of an Australian professional journal. An installable reader with a genuine page-turn experience rather than a PDF in a viewer.
2026Pre-launch
A commercial Shopify app that keeps product assets inside the store and attached to the product, instead of scattered across drives, inboxes and design tools, with a storefront extension that renders them anywhere in the theme.
Most businesses do not have a clean slate. They have a live site nobody has version-controlled, a script one person can run, and analytics that disagree with the invoices. The method Hart & Heim uses exists to make change safe in exactly that environment.
Before anything is written, the existing setup gets audited properly: the theme, the data, the analytics, the scripts nobody documented. Most briefs change once you can see what is actually running.
Unversioned production is the default state of most small businesses. Step one is usually a private repo, a deploy path and a review workflow, so every change afterwards is reversible and attributable.
Work lands as small, independently verifiable changes rather than one large reveal. You see progress continuously, and a bad decision costs a branch instead of a project.
Claims get checked against the live system with real tooling: parsing the actual structured data, reading the actual database, driving the actual booking flow. Not eyeballing a screenshot and hoping.
You keep the repository, the accounts and the documentation. The goal is a system your team can run and another developer can pick up, not a dependency on the person who built it.
Non-negotiables
Hart & Heim is a small, independent studio — two people, both senior. The engineer who scopes the work is the engineer who builds it and the one who answers when something breaks, so nothing is lost in a handoff.
That shape is deliberate. It keeps the feedback loop short, it means decisions get made by someone who has read the actual system, and it stops the familiar agency pattern where a good pitch turns into an unfamiliar junior on delivery.
The work runs from consumer products and internal platforms through to commerce engineering and search — but the common thread is businesses that have outgrown a manual process and need it replaced by something reliable, documented and theirs.
Working stack
Who you work with
Engineering and delivery
Scopes and builds the systems: applications, storefronts, data and the automation between them.
Sydney, Australia
Client strategy and customer success
Works out what the business actually needs before anything is built, and stays across the account once it is live.
Brisbane, Australia
Answered plainly, including the ones with awkward answers.
Every engagement starts with a conversation about the actual system, not a template proposal. If it turns out the problem is smaller than a project — or someone else is a better fit — you will hear that.
hello@hartandheim.comSydney, Australia (AEST / AEDT) · Working worldwide, across timezones · Hart & Heim replies within one business day.
Useful to include
Scope and cost are quoted per engagement once the system has been looked at properly. No packages, and no number before the work is understood.