I'm Robert Foster.

I've been building on Shopify Plus for 12 years. I started as a freelance developer doing theme work for client stores, then spent three years as the sole in-house Plus developer for Tandy Leather — a global specialty retailer where I built and maintained four international storefronts across the US, UK, EU, and other regional markets. In 2023, I started FosterUI to work on the specific problem I kept seeing across every engagement.

I saw the same pattern repeat itself endlessly. A scaling brand would ask for a simple feature — a bundle discount, a store locator — and the ecosystem's answer was always the same: install an app. The app marketplace created structural incentives for additive solutions. Every feature gap was filled with another subscription, another JavaScript payload, another external dependency.

The result was predictable: fragile codebases with 50+ dependency points. Sites became sluggish, expensive to maintain, and one bad deployment away from breaking. I realized that the industry had optimized for implementation speed at the expense of performance — but the real leverage was in subtraction.

I built FosterUI with a singular mission: to fix the engine, not paint the car. I don't do design. I don't manage ads. I replace rented, slow software with lean, native code that you own and control.

The pattern across every engagement is the same: the store's performance problems are almost never caused by what's running — they're caused by what isn't being removed. SideTrak was making 227 HTTP requests before their first product image loaded. Stand Steady's page took 32.5 seconds to fully load. In both cases, the fix started with deletion. For Tandy Leather, the challenge was different — migrating a century-old brand's global Shopify presence to Plus while building a Metafield-powered store locator for 100+ physical locations. The Director of Ecommerce reported a 20% increase in online sales in the opening week.