Company

Lisa Jolly refers to her business as both a drug and a sport, sometimes in the same breath. Her story plays out like a soap opera bred with an action-comedy film, and she doesn’t mince words in telling it. Lisa, founder of The Honeybunch Shop, has no time for “PC rubbish” – she swears like a sailor, and pours out her personal and professional failures (#nofilter) on social. It’s this catharsis, I’m certain, that has carried her through a two-year entrepreneurial rollercoaster, smiling through every plunge.

“Just say yes,” Lisa tells me over Skype from her hotel room in New Zealand.

That one little word – yes – was the catalyst for big things.

The Legends League has always been much more than a business for Bryan Espiritu.

Since the very beginning, it’s served as a physical extension of Bryan’s creativity; a way for him to share his thoughts and feelings through streetwear.

I sat down with Bryan recently after paying a visit to his retail storefront in Toronto, affectionately called The Legends League Sweatshop. Bryan’s newest venture sits on a quiet side street off of Spadina Avenue just South of Queen West. A low-key hideout for a brand that’s been making a lot of noise.

Not only has The Legends League become a staple in the wardrobes of trendsetters and artists across the city, it’s also received cosigns from hometown heroes like Drake and Majid Jordan.

While Bryan’s recent success is impressive, if you don’t know the real story behind the brand, you’re only getting a piece of the picture.

A ceramic artist fires a plate in an industrial kiln in her bright studio loft, overlooking a community garden and a row of hip bustling eateries. This isn’t New York City. It’s Michigan.

There are parallel timelines in the history of Detroit. The popular version that gave the metropolis its “Motor City “ moniker and ended in bankruptcy and desertion is just one side of the story.

Sit back, put on some rose-tinted glasses and a Motown LP, and let me tell you another version.

Valentina Rice envisioned a world where everyone had access to food made with hands and love. And sauce made from real tomatoes. She quit her job three years ago to launch Many Kitchens, a farmers’ market for the internetting masses.

The Airstream, with its iconic riveted aluminum shape, trends in cycles like history’s best fashion pieces – bomber jackets, wide leg denim, classic kicks. It’s on the upswing, enjoying a healthy resurgence in popularity thanks to wanderlusting millennials with vintage leanings. Airstream’s simple, timeless vessels began to undergo extreme makeovers, emerging as luxury apartments on wheels.

A gutted Airstream is a blank canvas, and businesses were getting wise to its potential as a flexible pop-up shop or a moving showroom.

This is the second post in our two-part series about Shopify merchants running businesses from the road. Last week, we shared the story of a serial ecommerce entrepreneur, boondocking off the grid. This week, our subjects are two makers glamping and retailing their way across America’s pop-up circuit in a renovated vintage Airstream studio.

If you’re an avid reader of the Shopify blog, you already know about the two in-depth case studies and business giveaways done by our content team. The first was Hello Matcha, a tea dropshipping business which wound up generating $922.16 in revenue in three days, and the second was Think Pup, a dog-themed t-shirt line that earned $1,248.90 in three weeks.

As part of the content team at Shopify, it was now my turn to build an ecommerce business from scratch and post my findings and results here on the blog, and give the business away. 

With Syght Glasses, that’s exactly what I set out to do.

When you think of Alaska, usually you think of pristine landscapes, ice-capped mountain tops and grizzly bears.

But there's another important cultural element that has taken hold in America's far north that you might be surprised to learn about - an emerging hip-hop movement.

A key player in this movement is Travis Brady – a hip-hop producer and entrepreneur from Anchorage, Alaska.

Brady’s website, The Drum Broker, is the largest online drum sample business in the world selling digital drum kit downloads to everyone from music hobbyists to some of the biggest beat-makers in hip-hop. 

Farbod and Kyle are two close friends living in New York City. They both love food, and share an affinity for spice. But every time they went out to eat together, they realized that one thing was always missing—the special ingredient for everything—sriracha.

In this customer spotlight, we dig in to the process behind manufacturing a unique product, getting featured on massive online blogs, as well as the pains along the way of building Sriracha2Go.

A love for typography and minimalistic design is all it took for designer Jeff Sheldon to get started on a life-changing path.  

A designer by day, and entrepreneur by night—Jeff has been able to build an online t-shirt, and lifestyle product empire over the past few years.

In this customer spotlight, we catch up with Jeff and learn more about the growth and development of Ugmonk.

MixedMade is the combined efforts of Casey and Morgen who found that the most interesting things come from mixing the unexpected.

They set out to make the most versatile and delightful hot sauce using just two ingredients: honey and chili peppers.

They’ve quickly grown their small batch honey business into an extremely successful endeavour.

I was able to catch up with Morgen, and in this post he shares some information on how they grew so quickly.

Want to see how one couple is making $600,000 selling digital downloads?  Be sure to take a look at this case study.