A Look at Our Company Retreat

In June 2016, the entire Big Cartel crew gathered in Austin, Texas for the annual company retreat - Indie Fest.

It's a time to look back on what we accomplished in the past year, and look forward to how we can better serve artists in the year ahead. It's also an important opportunity for our remote team to get to know each other and work face to face. We returned from this meetup refreshed and excited about the work we're doing, and we thought we'd share a little about what we learned.

There are now over 900,000 stores that rely on Big Cartel to make their business run. Those stores collectively have 3.6 million products, and they're adding 6,000 new products every day. That's four products every minute.

Since Big Cartel started this journey almost 11 years ago, our army of artists has received over 30 million orders. That adds up to $1.5 billion in total revenue (or $13 every second, if you're keeping track) that went straight into the pockets of independent makers. We're endlessly proud to be part of each artist's story as they share their work and build their business.

We're proud of how much our small team is able to accomplish. For example, Big Cartel's Design team consists of only four people, but they get an incredible amount of work done. Where similar companies may have entire teams that specialize in designing specific features or doing research, Big Cartel's designers are challenged to think about our company's design as a whole - from themes, to blog illustrations, and how your shop admin looks and functions, they do it all. And we think that our approach is more cohesive as a result.

Our Support team, the largest team within Big Cartel, makes sure that each of our store owners gets the help they need to keep their businesses running smoothly. A big part of that is by responding to emails within about 45 minutes, even outside of regular business hours. The same team that answers individual questions also constantly maintains and improves Big Cartel's help site, tests new store themes and integrations to make sure they work smoothly, and writes for our blog from their unique perspective.

We could go on about how each of the 33 people on the Big Cartel team works hard to build new tools for artists, but we'll just say that we're proud to work with them, and for you, each day.