Wes Buckwalter
Founder & CEO
Wes Buckwalter is the founder and CEO of SeaMonster Studios, a Seattle-based creative agency and Shopify Premier Partner that has delivered over 1,500 websites. He's run it for nearly 20 years, and his team handles the whole job under one roof: branding, packaging, subscription programs, WCAG accessibility, and the Shopify builds that tie it all together.
Wes came up on the merchant side. Before SeaMonster, he worked in the coffee industry as a marketing and ecommerce manager and built that company's first ecommerce website, back when ecommerce was, in his words, "primitive and in its infancy." Coffee is still all over his client list (Rusty's Hawaiian, Slingshot Coffee, Caffé D'arte, Canopy Coffee, and Everyman Espresso), alongside Vital Proteins, Western Chief, the University of Washington, and Wild Waves Water Park. SeaMonster is a listed Recharge agency partner, and the employee who leads its accessibility work is, officially, Captain Accessible.
His pitch is squeezing more lemonade out of the lemon you already have. Most merchants chase new traffic. Wes would rather spend $3 on samples in a customer's box than $29 getting the next person through the door. He also pushes back on how Shopify brands talk about loyalty: "it's not about loyalty, it's about affinity." On accessibility he's just as direct. The overlay widgets stores bolt on are "essentially placebo," and a site that isn't accessible leaves 25% of its possible audience on the table. Those shoppers don't come back.
Wes is based in Seattle, and his LinkedIn headline reads "CEO | Instigator." He's a self-described coffee nerd, though he'll admit he didn't know he liked tea until somebody handed him a cup.
