They're meant to be serving him. Instead, he was serving them, propping up their sizeable enterprise at the expense of his own (solo with meagre profits ~$20k/y).
The boost in sales since could've been achieved with a modest revamp or be entirely unrelated.
I don't think anyone at his scale should be paying $175/hr for custom illustrations especially when they look like the placeholder illustrations used in every startup template these days. For something specific like illustration, don't trust a random hire from the agency - go via UpWork or similar and find a freelancer whose portfolio you can vet in advance.
He should've used a well-designed Shopify theme for $300 and instead put money towards product photography. That'd get it 90% of the way comfortably and he'd have $40k+ still in his account. (I say this as a 20+ year web designer whose career has been eaten by platforms and templates.)
1000% agree. A lot of web dev is insanely overpriced. Find a good cheap template and save tens of thousands. I guarantee you an agency will not be 100x better than for the 100x price difference. Web is one of those "make once, use often" industries that we don't really know how to price yet, but $175/hr is definitely not right.
Agencies aren't selling you superior talent. They're preying on your ignorance. Most of the best web stuff is free, made by people who are either passionate about their craft and want to give it away, or else have to prove the value of their labor because they were born in a poorer country and merit is all they have to prove themselves with. When you work with an agency, all it means is that you're too scared (or don't know how) to vet design and dev work accurately, so you're paying extra for the illusion of quality. Trust me, you're not going to get that. You're just ripping yourself off.
The boost in sales since could've been achieved with a modest revamp or be entirely unrelated.
I don't think anyone at his scale should be paying $175/hr for custom illustrations especially when they look like the placeholder illustrations used in every startup template these days. For something specific like illustration, don't trust a random hire from the agency - go via UpWork or similar and find a freelancer whose portfolio you can vet in advance.
He should've used a well-designed Shopify theme for $300 and instead put money towards product photography. That'd get it 90% of the way comfortably and he'd have $40k+ still in his account. (I say this as a 20+ year web designer whose career has been eaten by platforms and templates.)