Chris & Kay Leah.
A husband-and-wife studio in Ashton-under-Lyne, Tameside. One engineer, one SMB owner — set up together in August 2025 and already working with manufacturers, fabricators, industrial-door firms and reactive-maintenance outfits from Mossley to Warrington to King's Lynn. One rule: the people who sell you the work are the people who do the work.
Founders
Chris Leah
Been building web and software since he was thirteen. Cut his teeth at a Manchester agency on projects like Dr Now and Claim Through Us, then moved into platform engineering — Site Reliability Engineer at Flywheel, Senior Staff Production Engineer at WP Engine after the acquisition, now Senior Software Engineer there — keeping enormous WordPress infrastructure online at scale. Happy Webs brings that same engineering discipline to SMBs who'd otherwise never get near it.
Has been building with AI since ChatGPT landed in 2022 — fine-tuning, RAG, agent workflows, the lot — and specialises in wiring those capabilities into the systems SMEs actually run. Spends a lot of his time in and around industrial workshops — fabricators, door firms, engineers — so he knows the rhythm of the shop floor and writes every line of production code at Happy Webs himself. Goes deep on the technical detail (detail is where things break), so if you want a frank answer on why your stack is struggling, how AI actually fits into your business, or whether the bespoke system you've been quoted is worth the money, he'll tell you straight. Calls himself Chris; nobody's called him Christopher since primary school.
Kay Leah
Has owned a hair salon with her sister in Tameside since 2010 — sixteen years of running a real small business, meeting customers at the counter, doing the books on a Sunday night. She knows the SMB owner on the other end of the phone because she is one.
Took over her own salon website years back, kept learning, and built a virtual-assistant practice around it — kayleah.co.uk and digitalservicesnorthwest.co.uk — helping other small firms with admin, socials and the digital bits they didn't have time for. When we teamed up, she brought that lens to Happy Webs: sales, client care, admin, and a sharp eye on design and copy before anything ships. Chris engineers the tech; Kay makes sure the business around it actually works.
Why a two-person shop
Because an account manager shouldn't stand between you and the people doing the work.
We've both watched briefs get softened as they passed between three people, and good projects die in approvals. Now it's just us. You brief Kay, Chris builds it, nothing is lost in translation — and if you ring at 4pm on a Thursday, one of us picks up.
Studio
Ashton-under-Lyne
81 Penny Meadow, Tameside, Greater Manchester.
Since Aug 2025
New studio, growing fast. Seasoned founders — one senior engineer, one long-time SMB owner.
No retainers required
Fixed-price projects by default. Retainers only when the programme of work actually calls for it.
Let's see if we can help.
A 15-minute chat with Chris & Kay. No slides. No pitch deck. You tell us what's on your plate; we follow up by email with real thinking.