When Kylie Jenner sold a controlling stake
in her four-year-old makeup startup to
French beauty conglomerate Coty in No-
vember for $600 million at a $1.2 billion val-
uation, the 22-year-old CEO emerged a billionaire. The
sale of Kylie Cosmetics was an extraordinary achieve-
ment for the reality star turned entrepreneur, one that’s
even more notable for the fact that her company has
just 12 full- and part-time employees. To build a hyper-
efficient online brand, it helps to have the Kardashian-
Jenner influencer juggernaut in your corner, of course.
But perhaps just as important is Shopify, the Canadian
e-commerce logistics startup that powers everything
from Jenner’s website to the payment systems used in
all of her pop-up shops.
Kylie Cosmetics’ rise is exceptional, but far from
unique: Shopify works with some of the most successful
direct-to-consumer startups, including Allbirds, Bom-
bas, Brooklinen, Outdoor Voices, and Rothy’s (No. 33).
It also powers stores from legacy companies, including
Budweiser, The New York Times, and Nestlé. Shopify
signed its millionth merchant in 2019—it has sellers in
175 countries—and generated nearly $1.6 billion in an-
nual revenue, up from $1.1 billion in 2018. (The company
makes money from monthly subscriptions, as well as
additional fees for premium features.) Deloitte estimates
that between 2016 and 2018, companies on Shopify en-
abled $183 billion in transactions and created full-time
jobs for 1.4 million people. In the four days from Black
Friday through Cyber Monday last year alone, Shopify
merchants sold more than $2.9 billion worth of goods to
25.5 million people, up from $1.8 billion the year before.
Tobias Lütke, cofounder and CEO, who began build-
ing Shopify in 2004 to make it easy for entrepreneurs
to design e-commerce sites without hiring professional
developers, still has a long way to go to catch up to
Amazon, which controls half of all e-commerce salesFOR
ENABLING
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44 FASTCOMPANY.COM ILLUSTRATIONS BY AARON THE ILLUSTRATOR07