The agency didn’t start with a portfolio and a pitch deck. It started with running a DTC brand from scratch — co-founding Be Ukiyo, a blue light blocking glasses company, in 2019. Two years of building a product, managing supply chains, placing inventory in eight stores across Latvia and Lithuania, selling online through Shopify, and learning what e-commerce actually looks like from the inside. Net income crossed 100k€. The business was eventually closed, but what it left behind was more useful: a merchant’s understanding of what a website needs to do, not just what it needs to look like.
But honestly, the entrepreneurial thinking started much earlier than that. From around the age of ten, Kristians was already playing around with work documents and thinking about how businesses operate. His first actual job came at thirteen. That early sense of how work and business fit together never really switched off — it ran quietly in the background through university years at Riga Business School and Riga Technical University, through side ideas and early projects that didn’t fully take off, and eventually into the e-commerce venture that did.
After Be Ukiyo, Kristians spent over a year working with e-commerce businesses moving serious volume — understanding the full stack of online retail: payments, logistics, integrations, and the decisions that either compound or quietly kill a store’s growth. That context sits behind every project quo build takes on. Not theory pulled from case studies, but pattern recognition built from working close to the problem.
He later completed a Mini MBA in Innovation Management at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga — covering high-performance team building, AI strategy, financial management, and leadership in uncertainty. It sharpened the business thinking that was already there, and added a more structured lens to decisions that previously came from instinct.
A friend in marketing asked if he could build a WordPress site for one of his clients. The answer was yes. Around the same time, Kristians was deep in building another e-commerce project of his own — which meant he was already inside the WordPress ecosystem, not reading about it from the outside. One project became two. Referrals followed.
For the first year and a half, Kristians ran everything himself. Every client call, every project, every late night fix — all of it. That was the plan, and it worked, until the client base grew to the point where doing everything alone meant not doing anything properly. Meeting new clients, managing ongoing projects, answering questions, and delivering quality work at the same time — it’s possible with a handful of clients. At twenty or more, something breaks. That realisation was the mindset shift that changed everything.
A team formed — and that team is not a footnote. Without Ivan, Mariana, and the wider network of specialists quo build works with across projects, the quality of work that goes out the door simply wouldn’t be the same. Kristians’ honest view is that where he performs best is in building the conditions for good people to do their best work — removing friction, being straightforward about what’s needed, and treating every person in the team as someone whose contribution actually matters. The structure today is lean by design: a small core team, trusted specialists brought in per project, and a working model built around doing fewer things properly rather than more things adequately.
For over a year, Kristians handled every part of client work himself — not because he had to, but because that’s how he believed it should be done. That period shaped how quo build approaches every project today. He knows what it feels like to look at a site and wonder why it isn’t converting. He knows the pressure of a product launch, the frustration of a checkout flow that loses people at the last step, and what it actually means when a site goes down on a busy day. That experience doesn’t make every answer obvious — but it does change which questions get asked first. The goal has always been to be a real partner to clients, not just an executor of briefs. Outside of work, he’s a husband and father of two — which, if anything, has only made the focus on building something that actually lasts feel more important.
