In Marker
The Canadian e-commerce company is breathing down Silicon Valley’s neck as the next great enterprise behemoth
From my article in Marker, posted July 22, 2020
In late March, 15,000 gallons of beer were sloshing around in Peter Bulut’s tanks and barrels with nowhere to go. Bulut, the owner of Great Lakes Brewing Co., first started working in his father’s tiny craft brewery in Toronto almost 30 years ago, when he was 21. Back on March 13, when Covid-19 was creeping its way into Toronto, Bulut started taking small precautions, like suspending in-store beer tastings. Five days after that, facing a 50% drop in business, he laid off a quarter of his 52 employees. Then Bulut had an employee call Shopify to find out what it would take to convert the company’s online merch shop into an online beer-sales-and-delivery store. Bulut was surprised by Shopify’s response. “They jumped all over it,” he says. “They wanted to help us hit big sales volumes”….Read more
David H. Freedman 