Bristol agency splits in two and ships compliance software
vvast has separated its software from its services business and launched a Shopify tool aimed at the April 2026 packaging fee deadline. The agency half is now called Weekday Assembly.
vvast, a Bristol company that spent ten years running as an ecommerce agency, has split into two independent businesses.
The software company keeps the vvast name. The agency has been rebranded Weekday Assembly and is led by Laura Justice.
The split coincides with vvast's first shipped product: a data-ingestion and impact-reporting tool that sits on top of Shopify and pulls product and supplier data at SKU level.
The target is a deadline. From April 2026, UK Extended Producer Responsibility fees are modulated by recyclability, and incomplete data defaults to the most expensive 'red' band. Illustrative plastic fees in that band are up 29% year on year.
The EU Digital Product Passport extends comparable data demands to garments from 2027.
vvast says its buyer is the founder-operator of a Shopify brand turning over £600,000 to £10m, with no compliance or sustainability staff, currently managing all of this in spreadsheets. The company describes the gap it is filling as the space between "enterprise compliance software" and "a spreadsheet and hope".
On the company's own figures, the underlying technology has traded more than £200m of GMV over ten years, including £70m in FY24, and is deployed by one brand doing around $500m GMV a year. The agency was profitable throughout, according to vvast.
The company is running a pilot on the Outdoor Group's SDEX data-exchange standard, which it says is adopted across roughly 125 EOG members. The EOG has allocated vvast three brands and two retailers for the pilot.
vvast also lists a named client roster from its agency decade including VF and Deus, with Santa Cruz and a UK beauty multi-brand of about £32m GMV lined up as further pilots. It says it holds B-Corp, ISO and Cyber Essentials certification, and that its vvastify theme engine emits 72% less carbon than a baseline standard Shopify theme. All of those are the company's claims.
The software business is raising on SEIS/EIS to fund the standalone build, with institutional seed investors tracking progress, again on vvast's account.
The context is an agency sector cutting rather than splitting. Forrester's 2026 predictions forecast 15% of agency jobs lost this year, after 8% in 2025. WPP is cutting several hundred more posts by the end of 2026 under its Elevate28 restructuring. Worldwide ad spending grew 8.6% in 2025 while holding company revenues fell 1.2%.
Forrester's prescription is that agencies stop acting as client representatives and start owning proprietary products. The holding companies are trying that inside existing structures. vvast has done it by cutting the product loose as a separate company.
For a founder selling packaged goods into the UK, the date matters more than the corporate structure. If your packaging data is incomplete in April, the default fee band is the expensive one, and no software fixes supplier data retroactively at the point the invoice lands.
More: the new tool's product page · vvast