For a business owner who sells product, breaking into the twenty-first century can be a daunting task. That’s where Bold Commerce comes in.
It started with a meeting at Robin’s Donuts back in 2012, with 4 innovative guys talking about creating an app together for some extra beer money. Today, 3 short years later, they are a company with 65 employees and looking to hire 15 more.
After quitting their day jobs by spring 2013, the 4 guys—Stefan Maynard, Jay Myers, Eric Boisjoli, and Yvan Boisjoli—moved the business out of their basements to their first 1,500-square-foot office in Île-des-Chênes.
Though the business started with designing one app to help stores sell more product, now it is so much more.
“We are a full custom eCommerce agency,” explains Yvan Boisjoli. “We can help businesses online by setting up their store, theme, and make any custom app integration they can think of. Our first goal is to make sure they have the best support experience out there, and of course increase [their] sales.”
Bold Commerce works with all sorts of clients, from small ma-and-pa operations all the way to Fortune 500 companies like Cirque du Soleil.
The core of the business is working with the Shopify, a Canadian company that develops computer software for online stores and point-of-sale systems. 200,000 merchants currently use its platform.
“We are now Shopify’s number one partner globally out of 50,000 partners,” says Boisjoli. “They will always be our main focus.”
Bold Commerce strives to be more than just a job for people to go to. They want their company to be a great place that people want to work for. That’s why they have free daily lunches, beer on tap, video games, a foosball table, and no set work hours.
Jay Myers, one of the founders, says, “That’s a good bottom line, to enjoy what you do.”
“The 4 owners sit amongst all the employees and in the trenches,” shares Boisjoli. “Culture and work environment is our number one focus.”
Twice a year, they shut down the office for what they call a “hack day.” On hack days, the staff are encouraged to work on anything they want that will improve life at Bold.
Their motto is #innovateordie. They’ve taken on Google’s philosophy of spending 20 percent of their resources developing new and interesting ideas. Boisjoli says, “This is just because of our love of developing new apps and technology. We currently have 5 projects in the works that are not eCommerce-focused.”
When businesses buy one of Bold Commerce’s apps to help make their company more successful, it can come with a lot of questions.
“We’ve always put customer service ahead of everything else,” says Boisjoli. “We aren’t happy until our customers are happy. Our support staff is currently 30 percent of all our staff and we plan on adding more to make sure we can handle all the questions.”
With over 3,000 positive reviews and only 5 or 6 negative ones, their customer service efforts are paying off.
Employees of Bold come from all over, including from Winnipeg, Steinbach, St. Adolphe, St. Jean, and Morris. 4 of their employees come from Niverville.
The company is broken up into 2 different departments: apps and experts. As of right now, they have 21 apps online. Their goal for 2016 is to create an app per month.
“We were the first app developers to build apps that make the store owners money, so that was a big reason for our success,” says Boisjoli. “We kind’ve went against what apps were meant to be early on in the Shopify app store and built apps to help stores increase their bottom line.”
Bold Commerce currently has 3 office spaces, including 2 in the TransCanada Centre of Île-des-Chênes. That brings their space to 6,500 square feet.
“We are entertaining the idea of moving to Winnipeg. We do plan on keeping a remote office open in Île-des-Chênes regardless what we do next,” Boisjoli says. “We’re busier than ever. Although our roles have changed, there hasn’t been any slowing down.”
