A family business with global reach
Founded in 1967 and still family-run, Fletcher Stewart has spent more than five decades earning its place as a trusted master distributor of industrial safety equipment. From its headquarters and warehouse in Stockport, Greater Manchester, the company supplies a comprehensive range of premium brands to a worldwide B2B market, with appointed distributors reaching as far as Japan and Australia.
Fletcher Stewart's two core divisions — forestry and arboriculture, and work at height — make it one of the market leaders in distributing specialist safety equipment to those sectors.
With a team of just 15 people, the company punches well above its weight, combining technical product expertise with an exceptional standard of service that keeps customers coming back.
Website: www.fletcherstewart.com
Country: United Kingdom
Industry: Safety Equipment Distribution (Arboriculture & Work at Height)
Business model: B2B – mix of sales rep and online orders
Annual turnover: £4.5 million
Platform: Magento Open Source
Hyvä Product: Hyvä Theme
SKU: 1,594
Launch date: June 2025
What sets Fletcher Stewart apart
Fletcher Stewart doesn't see itself as just a supplier. The company operates as an expert partner — technically led, brand-focused, and deeply embedded in the industries it serves. It distributes trusted, world-renowned product brands, including its own STEIN and SOVOS lines, and its team continuously develops new ideas, materials, and techniques to support those products.
Their USP is simple: premium brands, real expertise, and hands-on industry support — all wrapped in an unrivalled B2B experience.
A B2B Market in transformation
The arboriculture and work-at-height safety equipment market is undergoing a significant shift. B2B buyers — arborist companies, industrial contractors, construction businesses, and work safety managers — increasingly expect the same seamless digital experience they enjoy as consumers. The days of ordering by catalogue or phone call are fading fast.
For distributors like Fletcher Stewart, this shift creates both a major opportunity and a serious threat. Get the digital experience right, and you can deepen loyalty, grow order volumes, and unlock efficiencies that traditional sales channels simply can't match. Get it wrong — or fail to move quickly enough — and customers will migrate to competitors who have.
The problem: 4 websites, 0 momentum
Before partnering with Fluid Commerce, Fletcher Stewart was already trading online — but its digital presence was fragmented, slow, and falling behind customer expectations. The core issues:
- Product catalogue split across four separate e-commerce websites, limiting visibility and creating confusion for customers
- Managing four sites was operationally inefficient and diluted the company's e-commerce performance and SEO presence
- Category pages across four sites competed against each other in search rankings, undermining organic discoverability
- Poor site speed — directly cited by customers as the reason they would not use the site to make purchases
- Running on an outdated version of Magento with limited B2B functionality
- Outdated design and user experience that no longer reflected the quality of the Fletcher Stewart brand
- Sub-optimal hosting that further compounded performance issues
In short, the digital experience was actively costing Fletcher Stewart revenue. Something had to change.
We came to Fluid Commerce with a set of objectives to transform our online business. From the initial conversations it was clear that Fluid Commerce understood everything from the start. Moving everything under one roof, with features provided in the Portal B2B accelerator, has allowed our customers to gain a rich experience using our website. We are impressed with the way the Hyvä Theme is working, and early indications from our customers are that it is making life a lot easier for them to purchase.
Why Fluid Commerce and Hyvä?
For Fletcher Stewart's directors, this was decisive. Fluid's developers are deep Magento B2B experts who understand the specific challenges of digital transformation in the B2B world, from complex pricing structures and custom catalogues to bulk ordering tools and account management.
The strategic approach to B2B eCommerce
Upon reviewing Fletcher Stewart's project objectives, Fluid Commerce identified Magento Open Source combined with its own Portal B2B feature platform — which is built on the Hyvä Theme — as the ideal foundation. The plan centred on three strategic pillars:
- Consolidate: Migrate and unify four separate websites into a single, powerful ecommerce platform, preserving data integrity for products, orders, and customers throughout
- Accelerate: Replace the legacy Luma theme with Hyvä to deliver industry-leading page speeds and a dramatically enhanced user experience — a core pillar of Fluid's proposal
- Differentiate: Develop high-fidelity creative assets for Fletcher Stewart's STEIN and SOVOS product brands to maintain brand equity during the transition to the centralised platform
Bespoke development was layered on top for the more complex requirements, ensuring the solution was tailored precisely to Fletcher Stewart's needs rather than forcing the business to fit off-the-shelf functionality.
The B2B eCommerce Tech Stack
Platform: Magento Open Source + B2B Portal
Magento Open Source provided the proven, scalable commerce foundation. Crucially, it was paired with Fluid Commerce's in-house B2B feature platform, Portal — developed by Fluid's own B2B experts and bringing together best-in-class B2B features in a single, deployable package:
- Custom catalogues and pricing structures
- Rapid and bulk order tools
- Advanced account management
Because Magento Open Source doesn't include these capabilities out of the box, Portal delivered them without the overhead of building from scratch — significantly reducing development time and cost for Fletcher Stewart.
Frontend: Hyvä Theme
Portal is built on Hyvä Theme, and this is where the performance transformation began. By replacing the legacy Luma theme with Hyvä, Fluid immediately unlocked a faster, lighter, more flexible frontend that gave developers the freedom to build sophisticated B2B features without the weight of Magento's traditional frontend stack.
Hyvä gave Fluid Commerce the flexibility to create an enterprise B2B platform that integrates cleanly with Magento, unlocking a rich suite of B2B-specific features for both Fletcher Stewart and their customers.
Other integrations
- Mollie Payments — integrated to enhance the checkout user journey and reduce friction at the point of purchase
- OGL Software ERP integration — streamlined to improve operational efficiency for the Fletcher Stewart team
The results
Lighthouse / Core Web Vitals: Before & After
Fletcher Stewart's Core Web Vitals and Lighthouse scores improved dramatically across every page and device. The numbers speak for themselves:
- Homepage: Desktop rose from 54 to 97, while Mobile climbed from 34 to 80.
- Category Pages: Desktop reached 96 (from 54) and Mobile hit 93 (from 29).
- Product Pages: The most dramatic shift, with Desktop at 99 (from 49) and Mobile jumping from a struggling 12 to a near-perfect 95.
Page Speed Improvements
Translating those Lighthouse scores into real-world improvement figures:
- Homepage mobile: +135%
- Homepage desktop: +80%
- Product page mobile: +690%
- Product page desktop: +102%
Business Performance
The page speed transformation wasn't just a technical win — it directly drove commercial results. Since launch in June 2025:
- Ecommerce revenue growth: +33%
- Conversion rate increase: +11%
- Average order value increase: +22.6%
- Order number increase: +8.3%
Traffic & Engagement
- Organic traffic increase: +170%
- Direct traffic increase: +564%
- Engaged sessions: +52.97%
- Engagement rate: +57.57%
- Average engagement time per session: +100.67%
Desktop vs mobile engagement in B2B e-commerce
The device split has remained consistent at approximately 70% desktop / 30% mobile — which is typical for a B2B customer base.
But even within that 30%, the impact of mobile performance improvements is already telling: new customer conversions that simply weren't happening before the rebuild are now being captured.
The customer who finally bought online
Sometimes a single story captures the impact better than any percentage point. Nigel Fletcher recalls one customer who had never placed an online order with Fletcher Stewart — specifically because of the site's poor mobile performance. Within two weeks of the new site going live, that customer placed their first-ever online order.
That's the real promise of Hyvä: not just metrics, but moments. Customers choosing to buy from you instead of walking away.
Hyvä felt like it would have the biggest impact for many reasons, and teamed with Fluid's Magento B2B feature platform Portal, it was the ideal fit for the needs of the client and their customers. I've long been an advocate of Hyvä and I would recommend a move to this frontend framework for any Magento or Adobe Commerce merchants to improve speed, reduce development costs, and increase flexibility in design.
B2B e-commerce lessons learned
What could have been done differently?
In hindsight, a fully bespoke design for the entire website would have been beneficial — and is something Fluid Commerce would explore for future upgrades. Budget constraints meant this wasn't possible for the initial build, but the performance and commercial results achieved demonstrate that a best-in-class Hyvä implementation delivers exceptional outcomes even without a ground-up custom design.
Advice for merchants considering Hyvä
Nigel Fletcher's message to merchants still on legacy Magento themes is clear: "Move to Hyvä to reduce cost, improve page speed and SEO, and give your design team a lot more flexibility."
About Fluid Commerce
Fluid Commerce is a specialist B2B ecommerce agency dedicated to helping manufacturers, wholesalers, suppliers, and distributors achieve significant online revenue growth.
Using Magento, Adobe Commerce, Hyvä, and Shopify Plus, Fluid builds B2B feature-rich ecommerce platforms and self-service customer portals that solve real commercial challenges.
The agency has deep expertise in complex B2B integrations and has migrated numerous businesses to Hyvä — and is recognised as a Hyvä Gold Partner.
Key clients include Fletcher Stewart, Shoal Group, Trutex, and Netceed across manufacturing, wholesale, distribution, and supply sectors.
Website: https://www.fluidcommerce.co.uk/
