We’re making the Internet better, one website at a time.

2006 Freelance

The Adventure Begins

After 10 years of working in a variety of roles within the design industry, Founder Shawn Johnston decided it was time to strike out on his own. Armed with ample experience, a love of process, and a passion for web design, his one-person team started designing and building for charities and small businesses.

2011 Employee #1

Gaining Momentum

After doggedly hunting for leads on Craigslist, Shawn finally built up enough of a client roster, reputation, and Google rankings for his volume of work to become too much. Abe Friesen was hired as a project manager to help answer questions and support existing websites.

Abe departed in 2015 to take on a new management position at an agency we’d done build work for. But he forever lives on at Forge, in our Slackmoji:

2012 First Agency Website

Freelancer No More!

We finally launched our first agency website. At this stage we were a team of eight, and mostly developers. Our belief in process and our passion for what we do has been a part of our ethos from day one.

2015 Growth Continues

More People, More Services

Our sites were driving awesome results for our clients, so we launched a new service side of the business: digital strategy consulting. We launched an array of engagement options like SEO reporting, social media management, and monthly support. This was an important milestone, as the recurring revenue stabilized our business and began to even out our cash flow.

2016 Strategy First

Enhancing Our Offering

We saw an emerging trend towards the commoditization of websites, with the launch of services like Squarespace and Wix. We doubled down on the strategic side of our business, got serious about information architecture, content strategy, and UX design, and expanded our process. Rather than providing a website as a product, we began providing strategy as a service… with a high-performing website as the outcome.

Unfortunately, this epiphany came too late, and our long run of competing on price caught up with us. Unable to sustain our overhead while making this pivot, we had to downsize by almost 50%. Every team member found their next gig within weeks, and we did everything we could to ensure they were taken care of. But it was a really tough year.

2017 Design Systems

Stop Reinventing the Wheel

While the dust settled after our pivot and team changes, Shawn pursued a vision. He saw consistent patterns in how content was structured and users navigated websites. What if we could leverage those patterns to build a layered, systematized foundation as a basis for websites? This would become the beginning of significant R&D efforts, which would impact every facet of how we work—from the flexibility of our websites to the health of our agency as a whole.

2018 Anvil is Born

Our First Foray into Innovation

Shawn’s vision of reusable frameworks based on known content patterns, underlining an unrestricted creative front end, started to bear fruit. Codenamed “Anvil,” we developed a WordPress-based framework to become the foundation for all of our builds. This year was one of experimentation, and the results were game-changing. We reduced total development time, and this allowed us to put more time back into our process, QA, and client support. We thought we’d hit the nail on the head at the time, but we still wouldn’t get there for about four more years…

2020 Back in Black

Debt-Free and Growing

By taking advantage of several amazing federal R&D programs (we’re so lucky to live in Canada!), we leveraged the thousands of hours invested into Anvil to pull us out of the debt we’d dug back in 2016. We were also fortunate that Forge had been a fully remote team prior to the pandemic, so we didn’t experience any upheaval this year.

2021 Sustainable Growth

Investing in Ourselves

By adding additional team members, we continued our growth without sacrificing quality or client experience. This included key hires to support training, QA management, and content strategy. Numbering 16 full-time team members from Victoria to Toronto, we were now a well-rounded and deeply experienced team rooted in a commitment to process and client success. We also implemented a new suite of HR practices, designed to support our remote team, build a sense of purpose, and prioritize mental health and wellbeing.

2021-22 Product Development

Engineering the Future of Web Development

In late 2021, Shawn hired three engineers to build a low-code website builder that would do what we’d hoped Anvil would accomplish—maximize efficiency in web development, making it faster and easier to build a great website (still without sacrificing quality). In December 2022, we built our first client website on that new tool…

2023 Product Launch

We Did It! 🎉

In February 2023 we launched our first website built on Refoundry. We’ve continued to build every site on it since, totalling well over 100 as of summer 2025. Our clients LOVE how flexible their sites are—no more hiring a developer for basic changes that are locked in code or a theme. Clients are set up to fully own their websites, and we’ve drastically changed our efficiency. Our team has also continued to iterate Refoundry, and other agencies have been flocking to adopt it for their builds. We’re just so proud.