Shopify recently spoke with John Surdakowski, Founder and CEO of Avex Designs. We discussed how Shopify empowered Avex to hone their offerings and grow their business. 

Avex is a Shopify commerce agency that partners with high-growth and enterprise companies to create transformative, customer-centric commerce experiences. 

Before partnering with Shopify, Avex worked cross-platform to meet the needs of their clients. But the approach of doing everything for everyone hampered their growth, making it more difficult to meet the demands of enterprise-level customers. With an eye towards scaling—both their own practice, and their clients’ businesses—the Avex team narrowed their focus to a commerce platform that pioneers innovation, champions merchant growth, and boasts a thriving ecosystem, ensuring optimal support and growth opportunities for their merchants.

They chose Shopify. Then they doubled down.

Here’s just some of the growth they’ve experienced since they made that choice:

• Grew revenue by 500% over 3 years
• Grew from 2 to 40 employees
• Built new relationships with enterprise clients including Marchesa

Struggling to Scale with Legacy Platforms

It’s a classic hustle story. When CEO, John Surdakowski, founded Avex in 2014, he had many hats to wear. This included working on whatever platform a potential customer brought to the table. If you were on it, they would work with it.

At first, this strategy worked. Avex grew and became a sustainable business. But as the potential contracts got larger, more numerous, and more involved, Avex hit a wall. Straddling this many platforms limited them to offering only web design and development work when they knew they had so much potential to do more to meet their clients’ goals. Without an established commerce platform partner, it was challenging for Avex to deliver advanced solutions for quick and successful enterprise scaling. 

In 2018, John attended a Shopify Partner event and a lightbulb went off in his head. Being everything to everyone was getting in their way. It was time for the agency to focus their expertise and offer more specialized solutions. 

And partnering with Shopify was just the way to do it. With Shopify, Avex could leverage cutting-edge technology to keep them ahead of the competition and access incredible ecosystem support.  

Better and Faster Client Builds with Shopify

Fast forward five years, and Avex has grown exponentially—over 500% in the last 3 years alone. 

“The biggest contributor to our business growth was becoming more specific and niche with the verticals and the platforms that we work with,” says John. “Shopify allows us to be far more focused on who we’re going after as far as who our clientele is, what value we bring, and the services we can bring to the table.”

Avex positions themselves to clients as true partners, ones that focus on their pain points, their goals, and what they’re trying to achieve. 

That’s exactly what Avex finds in their partnership with Shopify, which offers technology that dives deep into the needs of merchant types and verticals to best serve their needs. While their clients overlap in focus across fashion and lifestyle brands, the tools needed to keep them innovative and ahead of both customers and the competition are diverse. 

That’s where the Shopify ecosystem comes in, with a deep library of quick-to-implement cutting-edge tools, systems and business integrations that meet the ever-evolving needs of Avex’s merchants—and their customers. 

The ecosystem also provides access to an unrivaled depth, breadth, and caliber of supportive partners willing to lend their expertise and engage in joint marketing efforts. Frequent interactions with the Partner team and event participation keep Avex educated about new features so that they can get them right to customers.

“Shopify’s community isn’t competitive; we’re trying to help each other out,” says John. “Competitors share leads or ideas, and the SaaS partners and wider community share the goal of making commerce easier for merchants of all sizes, from SMBs all the way through to enterprise.” 

The ecosystem is a key reason why Avex can now deliver better client builds, faster than ever before. So, too, is the access to hundreds of new features released in every new Edition—innovative solutions that help reinforce Avex’s status as industry experts.

“Shopify’s speed to market in releasing new product features, especially in recent years, is very impressive. They’re releasing updates and getting them in the hands of agency and tech partners quickly.” — John Surdakowski, Founder & CEO, Avex Designs

With so many Shopify successes under their belt, Avex has positioned themselves as Shopify experts who can address multiple challenges and successfully scale sites—and with the growing market demand for Shopify, this has helped the agency grow.

Large Merchants Turn to Avex as a Go-to Agency

Large enterprises come with large demands. That’s just fine with Avex.

Since partnering with Shopify, Avex has built fully customizable solutions and completed successful migrations for notable Shopify merchants, including NAKEDCASHMERE and Quip.

With Shopify, Avex has a trusted and reliable commerce platform partner who truly cares about their growth. Shopify is constantly innovating and opening up new revenue opportunities for their partners. 

“Shopify’s Partner Program has continued to evolve and help us grow our business. Their investment in the partner ecosystem, including in Avex, has been a critical part of our success.” –John Surdakowski, Founder and CEO, Avex

Today, Avex’s multi-talented team continues to offer expertise in many things: UX design; branding; internationalization; advanced personalization; customer retention techniques; and platform migration. 

Their focus on Shopify has allowed them to do this. Not being bogged down in straddling many different cumbersome platforms means Avex can focus their expertise on one platform that offers a plethora of capabilities.

Avex’s only regret? Not partnering with Shopify sooner.

“I would tell agencies looking to partner with Shopify that you will get a true partner,” says John.

Join partners like Avex Designs in building high growth Shopify practices, powered by best in class commerce technology. Get started today.

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