Top Shopify Execs Depart
Shopify’s executive leadership is looking at a bit of a
shakeup. Three of its top seven executives will be leaving in the coming months, leaving room for some fresh faces to join the team.
In a recent blog post, CEO
Tobi Lutke said Chief Talent Officer Brittany Forsyth, Chief Legal Officer Joe Frasca, and Chief Technology Officer Jean-Michel Lemieux “will start to transition out of their current roles.” While no one is exactly sure what this transition will entail, the company insists that the employees in question have completed 2-3 “tours of duty” in their careers at Shopify and have achieved incredible things that will live on as their legacy.
These
positions are large shoes to fill, but there’s no doubt that qualified professionals everywhere are champing at the bit to be part of an eCommerce business as successful as Shopify.
Since the pandemic began last spring, Shopify watched its valuation soar as many businesses went virtual during lockdowns. It currently has a market cap valuation of C$182.7 billion ($146 billion), above Canada’s top lender
Royal Bank of Canada.
Bezos Releases Final Shareholder Letter
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos published his 2020 shareholder
letter, a letter that will act as his final piece before stepping down as CEO in the latter part of 2021.
Bezos started
publishing his annual shareholder letter back in 1997, almost a quarter of a century ago.
While this year’s letter discusses a few business matters, the primary focus of the letter is Amazon’s employee base, which has been in the
headlines this year. But, there’s a stark juxtaposition between Bezos’ letter and the news that Amazon recently prevailed in a failed unionization
effort at its Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse.
Amazon has notoriously boasted a core set of leadership
principles, one of the main ones being that the company is “customer-obsessed.” In the future, Bezos said, he wants Amazon to do the same for its employees.
Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, which led the campaign in Alabama put it perfectly. “Bezos’s admission today demonstrates that what we have been saying about workplace conditions is correct,” Appelbaum said. “But his admission won’t change anything, workers need a union – not just another Amazon public relations effort in damage control.”
Time will tell if Bezos meant what he said in his letter. But, in the meantime, he said he plans to focus on how to make Amazon’s warehouses
safer. Amazon is developing automated staffing schedules that rotate employees through different jobs that use other muscle-tendon groups. It should begin deploying the technology later this year.
Target Tests New Shipping Methods
It seems nearly impossible for other companies to keep up with Amazon’s shipping and
logistics capabilities, but they sure do try. Target, looking to speed up its deliveries, will now enlist a dedicated separate team of
delivery people instead of just shipping packages through typical carriers.
The new system will consist of employees picking up items and packing them at stores. The items will then be transferred multiple times a day to the store’s sortation center. From there, technology from two Target-acquired companies,
Grand Junction and
Deliv, will help group packages for the most efficient routes to neighborhoods. Finally, a third Target-owned company,
Shipt, will use contract workers to help deliver packages to people in the same parts of town, in addition to the regular carriers.
This venture marks the importance of smart acquisitions since it gives Target the goods to compete with bigger rivals (Amazon obv), as customers have come to expect speed and efficiency in their deliveries.
These improvements also come as sales through Target’s digital channels
grew by almost $10 billion in 2020 thanks to a 235% increase in its same-day services such as store pickup, curbside pickup, and its ever-important acquisition of Shipt.
