About
We build software for problems we still have.
Blue Monk is two people. Ace Reunis runs Threadheads, an apparel business doing $25 million a year with production in-house. Brett Leggett builds the systems that run it. There is no third person, no account manager and no bench — which is a constraint, and we’d rather you knew about it on this page than found out in month three.
Why we exist
Every firm here used to be operators. We still are.
Blue Monk started because we kept building things for our own business that we couldn’t buy. A production system that understood print. A customiser that produced artwork the floor could actually use. A way to make Shopify, the warehouse and the courier agree on one order.
Once you have built those, other operators ask for them. That is the whole origin story. It also sets the boundary: we sell what we run, and we run everything we sell.
It matters because the hard part of this work isn’t the code. It’s knowing which edge case happens every week and which one happens twice a year, and building for the first without pretending the second doesn’t exist. You learn that on a floor, not in a discovery workshop.
The businesses behind the claim
$25M
7-figure
Personnel
Who is actually on it.
Both of us are on every engagement. Neither of us is a salesperson, because there isn’t one.
- Ace Reunis
- Operations, process design
- Co-founder of Blue Monk, and of Threadheads — the apparel business he still runs. Runs the floor there: production, fulfilment, merchandising, and the awkward exceptions that never make it into a requirements document. Takes every first call.
- Brett Leggett
- Engineering, systems architecture
- Co-founder of Blue Monk. Builds and runs the systems: Shopify, Supabase, the production ERP and everything wired into it. Writes the code that has to still work on a Saturday.
Blue Monk Pty Ltd — an equal partnership, registered in Australia.
Why Blue Monk
Twelve ordinary bars, played by someone who practised.
Blue Monk is a 1954 Thelonious Monk composition. A twelve-bar blues — the most ordinary form in the music — played by someone who refused to play it the ordinary way. The structure underneath is completely conventional. What sits on top of it is not.
That is roughly the job. Your business runs on the same twelve bars as everyone else’s: orders in, stock, pick, pack, despatch, returns. Nobody needs the form reinvented. What they need is someone who knows the changes well enough to put something useful on top of them.
The other half of the reference: Monk practised, relentlessly, for years, before any of it sounded inevitable. The strangeness was earned. We like that part too.
Thelonious Monk · 1954
The limits
Four things we say no to.
Two people can’t take everything, and a firm that says yes to everything is telling you something.
Advertising, creative, or growth services.
We don't run your ads and we don't write your emails. Plenty of people do that well and we're not among them.
Replacing software that already works.
If Shopify, a well-configured 3PL and an off-the-shelf app cover it, that is the answer, and it is a cheaper answer than us. We'll say so in the diagnostic.
Staff augmentation.
We don't rent developers by the month into someone else's roadmap. We take a defined problem, quote it, and finish it.
Work we can't run in our own business.
It's the honest limit of the operator claim. Outside ecommerce operations we're just another firm with opinions.
Where we are
Australia, working with the US and Europe.
Most of the work is asynchronous, and the systems don’t care where they are deployed. We hold overlapping hours with US and EU clients and we write things down, because a two-person team in a distant timezone that doesn’t write things down is a bad experience for everyone.
Test the claim
Ask us something only an operator would know.
It is a fair test of everything on this page, and we would rather you ran it than took our word for it. Thirty minutes, no charge, no deck.
Ace Reunis takes these calls. Bring your numbers.