Can Luke Skywalker snowboard? Has he ever dropped an ollie racing down the snowy mountains of Hoth? To date, George Lucas has been non-committal on the subject. But back on Earth, Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke has stepped up.
“The way we think about it is, Amazon is trying to build an empire, and we’re an army of rebels,” Lütke told The Telegraph. “This is a role we picked for ourselves. [Amazon] is a hard thing to chase – they are really big and very good.”
So, Lütke, a keen snowboarder, is leading his very own rebel alliance. One that began when, along with business partners Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake, he opened his own online snowboard shop.
The three men soon realised the software Lütke had built to sell snowboards was, unlike their store, infinitely scalable. And so, Shopify began.
Shopify’s rise has been driven by its commitment to democratising e-commerce. The platform gives entrepreneurs the power to design sleek, customisable storefronts without writing a single line of code.
Whereas Amazon is a giant superstore, Shopify is more of an ‘everywhere app.’ A facilitator of independent retail rather than a direct competitor to the Seattle-based behemoth. Once you’ve signed up, you can drop your shop on any relevant channel, be it a website, a blog, or a social media platform.
As Forbes comment, it “works by centralising your product data, customers and operational tasks in one system that connects to all of your sales channels seamlessly.”
As a Harvard Business School Jedi, might say, ‘In business, growth is everything.’ Shopify’s has been exponential.
The Telegraph again, Shopify now “helps one million companies in more than 175 countries to build and run online stores, from Kylie Jenner’s cosmetics business to fast-growing millennial sportswear brand Gymshark and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.”
True to form, Lütke makes running Shopify sound like navigating a mazy piste, “My job has been a completely different event every half-year since the beginning, and that’s what I love about it the most,’ he told The Telegraph. ‘I love the change, I love having to adjust; that’s interesting to me.”
What’s the next challenge for the man whose ambition built a $127 billion business? Well, transport may prove tricky, otherwise, why not race Skywalker down the mountains of Hoth?