# Keir Whitaker

Keir Whitaker organizes Craft & Work, a small-format event series for soloists, founders, and leaders building businesses in and around the Shopify ecosystem. The events use short talks and conversation to explore the business side of that work.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/keir-whitaker/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keirwhitaker
- LinkedIn followers: 1,705
- Topics: ecommerce
- Based on 9 dated posts, latest 2026-10-07

## Summary

Keir Whitaker is most useful for small, conversation-led Shopify ecosystem events and open speaking access.

- Best for: A B2B events company launching a small Shopify founder community conference or intimate event format.
- Not for: Large online summits, enterprise marketing audiences, or sponsored keynote and registration campaigns.
- Check first: Confirm package details, rates, audience demographics, deliverables, and the right sponsor contact.

### Takeaways

- Craft & Work is about 50 attendees, four short talks, and no slides.
- Talks run 20 minutes or less; slide decks are not allowed.
- Speaking access is open: ask by comment or direct message with a rough idea.

## Main ideas

- **Small rooms beat big crowds**: Whitaker presents scale as a deliberate choice, positioning Craft & Work as an intimate gathering of around 50 people and an alternative to the come-down after large conferences. The pitch opens with the familiar aftermath of a big event — the memories, the questionable swag, the overflowing inbox — and offers a smaller format instead. The argument: a room this size makes real conversation possible.
- **Talks are short, slide-free and unfinished on purpose**: The format rules are the point, not logistics. Talks run 20 minutes or less, and slide decks are not allowed. Whitaker says sessions are designed to start conversations rather than deliver polished, definitive answers, with an exception only if a speaker has genuinely cracked the subject. A good session, by this measure, is one people are still discussing over coffee and later over a pint — one that prizes honesty over polish.
- **The subject is the business side, not the craft**: Whitaker's stated focus is 'the business side of what we do — what's working, what's not, and where we're headed.' The audience — soloists, founders and leaders building agencies, apps and digital businesses in and around the Shopify ecosystem — shapes the agenda, so sessions address that world rather than platform tutorials. The subjects are operational: money, people, partnerships and what goes wrong, not just product or growth.
- **Speaking access is deliberately open**: Whitaker says the question asked most often about Craft & Work is how to speak there. The answer: 'just ask' — by comment or direct message. No professional speaking record is required; an idea, a question or a rough outline is enough to start. Memorable talks have come from first-time speakers, Whitaker says, because everyone has something worth sharing. The no-slides rule and the stated exception for people who have genuinely solved something set a quality bar without restricting who can apply.
- **The event is built as a sequence, and the funding is visible**: The main day is not the whole product. Whitaker adds a Thursday evening warm-up of drinks, snacks, conversation and a quiz, partly to thank and celebrate the event's patrons — the businesses whose support makes the series possible. Free tickets were released to friends, colleagues and anyone working in and around the Shopify ecosystem, whether or not they were attending the main day, lowering the barrier to a first encounter with the community.

## Work to read

- [How to get a talk at Craft & Work: “just ask”](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/keirwhitaker_one-of-the-questions-i-get-asked-most-about-activity-7483089862896627712-uUWg)
- [Describing the event: about 50 people, four short talks, no slides](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/keirwhitaker_events-are-great-right-you-know-the-feeling-activity-7495148395771240449-zYK6)
- [The warm-up event and the patron model behind the series](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/keirwhitaker_apparently-a-passing-reference-to-airwolf-activity-7511441758099185664-tSzh)
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## Brand relationships

- **Craft & Work** (owned_business)
- **The Support Heroes** (sponsor)
- **FoxSell Bundles** (sponsor)
- **Recharge** (sponsor)
- **Sufio** (sponsor)
- **Zapiet** (sponsor)

## Partnerships

Keir Whitaker’s Craft & Work events are supported by patrons. The posts name one Presenting Patron and four Event Patrons for Craft & Work: LDN 2026, describing the event as an intimate gathering of around 50 soloists, founders, and leaders in and around the Shopify ecosystem. Sponsorship is described as event patronage, not through a public media kit. Before budgeting, ask for package details, including rates, audience demographics, contractual deliverables, and the right sponsor contact.

## Alternatives

- Mat O'Connor: Choose Mat O'Connor over Keir Whitaker when the launch needs someone who has run a larger ecommerce community conference, not a fifty-person day, or when the keynote has to land on a big stage. Their posts describe the Digital Clubhouse Summit in Manchester: 36 speakers, more than 200 people through the doors of the Science and Industry Museum, a Thursday dinner hosted by two partner companies, a compere roster keeping the day on schedule, a swag room that emptied early, and four speakers taking a public stage for the first time. They also cover speaking at eCommerce Expo at ExCeL for Hyvä and Mollie — a rehearsed 20-minute talk in front of ecommerce managers, directors and owners, with slides photographed to take back to the office — and connect that day to a wider agency and platform community spanning Shopify and Magento. For a founder conference bigger than fifty people, funded by sponsors and dependent on a speaker pipeline and day-of logistics, that is closer evidence than a single-track intimate event.
- Marty Parker: Marty Parker is the stronger pick when the conference is being built as a taught programme with outside practitioners in the room rather than as peer conversation. The posts show the model in action: bringing two people from Augusta National Golf Club into a university classroom to explain how tournament merchandise is planned and staffed, covering both sides of the operation — front-of-house selling and behind-the-scenes inventory — and framing the visit as experiential learning that should lead to students working the event the following spring. They also show a hosted conversation format: joining The Buzz with Supply Chain Now to discuss digital product passports, AI and automation in manufacturing, and customer feedback, drawing on forty years in product management and making the case that a single digital record could connect sustainability, sourcing and manufacturing strategies. For an events company seeking structured teaching and named guest practitioners, that is a clearer precedent than an intimate social-format gathering.
- Andre de Freitas: Andre de Freitas is the better choice when the conference's real need is technical delivery advice for founders, not event format. The posts set out a complete Shopify Plus platform rebuild for Pulse4all — migrating from WooCommerce, Circuly and Stripe, moving more than 3,000 subscriptions to Juo, building a customer portal for device swaps, payment updates and invoice history, unifying design and localised payment methods across 12+ regional storefronts, and simplifying integrations so less work stays manual — and a pre-Q4 resilience programme that pulls orders, payments, subscriptions and failed transactions from multiple stores into one dashboard and automates stock alerts and backorders. Both posts are written from the perspective of someone who has run stores and now does the work for brands, offering session material for an events company whose attendees are building or scaling Shopify stores.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/