You don’t see many tech startups with retail locations.
After all, there’s something antithetical to the concept of a startup signing a long-term lease for a retail space. But if you walked by 639 Queen Street last week, then you might have noticed that one of the country’s more well-known tech companies had taken up a temporary residence inside of the Burroughes Building.
For Ottawa’s Shopify, last week’s visit to Queen Street was the start of an experiment to see whether the company could find yet another way to support the more than 80,000 merchants that use its service. Taking a cue from the very companies it serves, Shopify has embarked on a tour across Canada and the United States where it will launch limited time pop-ups in select cities. On Tuesday, that tour landed in Toronto.
The pop-up featured demos of Shopify’s recently released point of sale unit, one on one appointments between its support staff and merchants, and group workshops.
The idea to bring a pop-up to Toronto came from Arati Sharma, Shopify’s Community Development Manager. Much of her job involves interacting with Shopify’s customers and helping them with whatever issues might crop up. It’s from those interactions she realized the company needed a more immediate physical presence to help its merchants more effectively.
“By doing several meet-ups in the U.S., I learned that our merchants need more than just one hour. A lot of them are small mom-and-pop operations, and they sometimes look out of place at a tech office. So I wanted to create a space where they could get the support they need,” she said. “Whenever I run an event for Shopify, people always pull out their support tickets and ask me questions. We have an amazing customer support team, but to access them you have to call or email us.”
It’s for that reason that Sharma decided to make Shopify’s Gurus the centre of the company’s Toronto pop-up.
Much like Apple’s so-called Geniuses, Gurus are the frontline of Shopify’s customer support team. They provide remote assistance to the thousands of merchants that use the company’s platform around the world, and with this retail tour, they’ve been given the opportunity to interact face to face with the people they help remotely on a regular basis.
“Being able to put a face to the merchants that you’ve invested so much time into helping has been the most rewarding things,” said Andrew Lowry, one of five support specialists Shopify flew down from its Ottawa office to help with the event.
In addition to the on-site support, the company also ran several different workshops aimed at helping attendees improve various aspects of their online presence. One of the more popular workshops was on product photography. “We help run more than 90,000 stores across the world; the stores that have better product photography sell more,” said Sharma, explaining the popularity of the workshop.
Another workshop covered how to design and run a pop-up. It was held by Natasha Singh, one of Toronto’s more prominent pop-up artists and owner of the Singhnature blog. Her presentation left many of the merchants that attended it determined to create their own pop-ups in the future, including Alanna Banks.
Banks is the owner of Fridays Off, an online store that sells handpicked sewing fabric. According to Sharma, Banks, with recently born baby in hand, was one of the first people to pass through the doors of the pop-up when it opened on Tuesday morning. In fact, many of the store owners that visited the shop were mothers just like Banks, leaving Sharma disappointed that she didn’t think to provide some kind of daycare support. “This week has helped ingrained in us what running a retail location actually means,” she said. “It’s been about putting ourselves in our merchants shoes, and realizing that running a retail location is not easy.”
Still, according to Banks, the pop-up was a success; not only did she get to meet with one of the Gurus and attend a couple of workshops, she also became a part of the Toronto e-commerce group and meet some of her peers. “It’s nice to know that there are people out there are using Shopify and haven’t made it to big time yet. You hear the stories of all the people that have made it, but rarely do you hear the stories of the people that are like me,” she said.
“I can’t wait for the next one.”
Shopify’s Retail Tour continues in various cities throughout Canada and the United States. Check out their website for more information.
Photo courtesy of Andrew Williamson.
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Igor Bonifacic is a writer working for the Toronto Standard. You can follow him on twitter @igorbonifacic.
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