Huge Buys London Commerce Studio Rotate° to Anchor New Composable Practice

Huge has bought Rotate°, the London commerce studio, and is building a whole new practice around it. Composable Commerce now sits as Huge's sixth core capability, next to products and platforms, marketing and content, customer experience, brand strategy and design, and data and AI. Terms weren't disclosed.

That framing is the interesting bit. Huge isn't bolting a Shopify shop onto the side of the business. It's handing a specialist team the keys to an entire practice line across a client roster that includes Google, Apple, PlayStation and PepsiCo.

What Huge is getting

Rotate° was founded by Jim Tattersall, who has run independent design and technology studios for close to 20 years. He leads the business with Andy Jackson and Chris Harris. The studio has spent more than a decade on headless and composable builds, and holds long-standing Shopify Plus partner status, a tier Huge says covers roughly the top 1.5% of Shopify firms. It is also one of 18 Commerce Layer Elite Partners worldwide, and works across Centra and commercetools too. Its own portfolio lists brands such as Rapha, Tracksmith, Chilly's and Big Green Egg.

The full team joins straight away and moves into Huge's Old Street office. Existing clients stay with them.

Why it fits

Huge employs more than 1,000 people and runs what it calls Atomic Teams: small human squads working alongside AI agents. Rotate° already worked the same way, with tight groups of senior people owning the result. Tattersall says both sides reached the view independently that "the best work comes from small, senior teams with real ownership over outcomes."

Huge CEO Josh Campo says commerce needs "real technical depth and true creative ambition in equal measure." Read that as a buyer admitting it is quicker to acquire proven platform engineers than to grow them.

For specialist founders, that's the lesson. Deep partner status on the platforms enterprise brands are moving to, plus a delivery model that suits how big agencies now want to work, makes you the foundation of someone else's next practice. That's a stronger seat at the table than being a line item.

Running a specialist studio and wondering who'd build a practice around you? Start the conversation at Agencies.co.

Sources: LBB Online, Huge press release (Business Wire), Shopifreaks, Rotate°