WeCommerce's Buyback Success

A story about how Andrew Wilkinson built and evolved a Shopify themes business into a public company worth hundreds of millions.

"We started a business about 10 years ago when we met the founder of Shopify. At the time we were running a design agency and he said 'We want to launch themes on our platform - we want people to be able to sign up and have different designs they can choose from, and we'll let you guys sell these themes on the platform for $150 to $250.'

We were thinking 'Hey, it's a small little Canadian company, these guys seem nice, let's do it.' We started doing it and Shopify just grew into a behemoth and we rode the whale and did really well. We actually sold the business in 2013 - we didn't realize how big Shopify would get.

Then we bought the business back in 2019 for 5-6 times more than what we sold it for. We made a big bet thinking Shopify was going to get a hell of a lot bigger. We created a holding company called WeCommerce and started buying businesses, building a mini version of Tiny within the Shopify ecosystem.

Then we took it public in December and we're listed on the TSX Venture Exchange up in Canada. Currently at about 663 million Canadian dollars market cap."