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In 2018, Andy Ives and Cayley Pater launched Made Trade, an online marketplace for sustainable goods. Ives was an advertising specialist, while Pater had spent her career in both market research and direct work with artisans.
While running the business, the duo frequently utilized third-party agencies for SEO, email marketing, and other digital services, but were frequently disappointed by the outcomes. They found that agencies often over-promised, under-delivered, and lacked a holistic understanding of the business—treating SEO and email marketing as isolated services rather than interconnected parts of a broader customer acquisition strategy.
This led them to build a solution in the form of Complete Breakfast, a startup functioning as a boutique digital agency that specializes in e-commerce.
The startup is focused on helping brands grow by treating their online presence as a single, integrated system. They handle custom website builds or redesigns, branding optimization, photography, email and SMS infrastructure, and overall ecosystem strategy.
“There’s no agency that we’ve seen out there where the people running it are actually former operators, and can take that holistic approach, really thinking about the broader business and how those services need to be integrated to drive meaningful growth,” Pater said. “Now—with Complete Breakfast—that is our mission.”
“Being the conductor”
Complete Breakfast operates on the idea that there is no silver bullet in advertising, but rather complete (hence the name), integrated strategies. For example, the most beautiful website buildout isn’t meeting its full potential if the optimization and retention strategies are weak, and vice versa.
Being former operators means Ives and Pater understand how every part of a business connects, from customer acquisition, to email follow-ups, to repeat purchase strategies. Building on this understanding, they are able to tailor digital solutions that actually move the needle.
“Our ability is more of the conductor or the orchestrator—being able to look at all of it together and pull out the pieces that are superfluous and push in pieces that are going to make a meaningful impact or difference for a business or a brand,” Ives said.
Mike Bennett Studios, owned by illustrator Mike Bennett in Portland, Oregon, is a strong example of Complete Breakfast’s work. The business has multiple arms—Wonderwood mini golf and restaurant, a cartoon aquarium, and a retail presence—and each had its own website before the larger company began working with Complete Breakfast.
The Complete Breakfast team integrated these into one cohesive website and helped Mike Bennett Studios with a massive e-commerce launch, handling photography and descriptions for all the new products. Essentially, their goal was to create an online experience that matched the already strong in-person brand Bennett had created.
“They didn’t have a unified online experience,” Ives said, “so they were leaving money on the table, because it is a very strong brand but [the online experience] was disjointed.”
Complete Breakfast also built email and SMS marketing from the ground up, managing all campaign messaging, and grew the online store 19x year over year in 2025 from the email and SMS campaign.
Overall, with Complete Breakfast’s approach, Mike Bennett Studios experienced 10x year-over-year revenue growth during the 2025 Christmas season.
The future
In the coming year, Complete Breakfast will adopt a dual focus. They plan to work on a few buildouts from scratch for companies with little or no existing digital presence as well as continue ongoing, month-to-month partnerships with current clients, such as Oregon-based Jacobsen Salt Company and Durham-based Bristles (which GrepBeat wrote about here). They’ll help these clients optimize their digital presence while maintaining the hands-on, operator-informed approach that sets them apart.
QUICK BITS
Startup: Complete Breakfast
Co-Founders: Andy Ives & Cayley Pater
Founded: 2025
Team size: 2
Location: Chapel Hill
Website: completebreakfast.agency
Funding: Bootstrapped
“We’re very hands on; either Andy or both of us are on every client call,” Pater said. “We want to be intentional about being able to dig in with all of our clients.”
Ives and Pater aim to grow Complete Breakfast into one of the country’s premier boutique e-commerce agencies. They take particular joy in helping startups and small businesses, striving to be the agency they wish they had found when they were operators themselves.