A practice, not an agency.
GoHighflier builds commerce and web platforms for brands that have outgrown whatever they launched on. We take on a small number of clients at a time, and the person who scopes your project is the person who builds it. There is no account layer between you and the work.
That's possible because of where the practice comes from. Our founder works on both sides of a line most people never cross: high-level software engineering inside government systems, where uptime, security, and auditability are not negotiable, and commercial platforms, where none of that matters if nobody wants to use the thing.
Most shops are one or the other. Design studios produce something beautiful that buckles under real traffic. Engineering shops ship something stable and joyless that no customer remembers. Both are half an answer, and brands end up paying two vendors to argue about whose half was wrong.
We're based in Los Angeles and work with brands wherever they are. Our clients are usually founder-led, working in fashion, eyewear, lifestyle, education, and creator businesses, and they come to us after an agency took their money and left them with something they can't edit.
Founder
Willie David Jones III
Los Angeles, California
Willie David Jones III is a Los Angeles based entrepreneur and technologist who spends his time in two places that rarely overlap: high-level software engineering within government systems, and building business platforms for brands.
The first teaches you that software is infrastructure. It gets audited. It has to survive people actively trying to break it. Nobody accepts “it works on my machine” as a standard. The second teaches you that none of that rigour matters if the result is slow to change, awkward to use, or says nothing about who the brand actually is.
Most people pick a side. What sets Willie apart is the ability to see the full stack at once, the architecture underneath, the interface on top, and the business model paying for both, and to hold all three inside the same decision rather than handing them to three different vendors.
He works at the intersection of technology, design, and entrepreneurship, building companies that are structurally sound and culturally resonant. Which is a longer way of saying: they hold up, and people like them.
Built where failure isn't an option
Government systems set a floor that most commercial web work never bothers to reach. Everything is reviewed. Everything is logged. Security isn't a phase near the end, and “we'll fix it after launch” isn't a plan anyone will sign off on.
We bring that floor with us. It shows up as real QA on real devices before anything ships, redirects mapped and tested rather than assumed, credentials and access handled properly, and a handover document that exists whether or not you ask for one.
None of this is glamorous and none of it makes a portfolio piece. It's the difference between a launch you sleep through and one you spend the weekend firefighting.
One accountable line, not three vendors
The usual arrangement splits strategy, design, and engineering across three companies. Each is competent. None owns the outcome. When conversion doesn't move, the strategist blames the design, the designer blames the build, and the developer points at the brief.
Here it's one line of accountability. The strategy that gets written is written by someone who knows what it costs to build. The design gets drawn by someone who will have to make it responsive. Nothing gets promised in a pitch that becomes somebody else's problem in month three.
It also means we'll tell you when a piece of work isn't worth doing. That's easier to say when we're not trying to keep three teams billable.
Structure and resonance are the same problem
Brands are told to choose: performance or personality. Fast and generic, or distinctive and sluggish. It's a false choice that exists because most teams can only deliver one of them.
A platform that converts is doing both jobs at once. It loads before the visitor loses patience, and it looks like it belongs to a brand worth buying from. Neither is decoration. A beautiful store nobody can use doesn't sell, and a fast store with nothing to say doesn't either.
We treat them as the same problem because they're solved in the same decisions: what renders first, what earns its weight, what gets cut.
What we do
Four services, run as a sequence. Most brands only need one of them to start.
Think we're a good fit?
Tell us what you're building and what isn't working. If we're the right partner we'll say so, and if we're not we'll tell you that too, usually along with who is.