Naz Hamid writes,

As a studio, we lament the lack of certain tools that augment and support the work we do. To account for this absence in our day-to-day toolboxes, we often hack together or build out temporal devices that make the work easier. Shifticons was born out of a growing desire to have the ability to create small custom icon web fonts for projects.

From the Shifticon FAQ,

n an increasingly digital age and across various platforms serving a variety of content, bandwidth, speed, and flexibility are important. Shifticons allows you to make custom icon web fonts that include only those icons that you need for whatever project you need them for. This saves time, bandwidth and prevents lag in serving up websites via desktop or more importantly, on mobile.