Our Story
Approosters was established in 2019 following years of extensive experience and learning in the global e-commerce landscape, both as merchants and developers. This is a brief history of our journey from starting our first online stores to fully commit to Shopify app development as Approosters.
Co-founders Samuli and Marko, with deep understanding of processing and shipping orders on a global scale, recognized what they could offer to Shopify merchants: an efficient way to handle shipping and order processing. To save hours - every day.
Back in the day, Samuli was focused on scaling his own online stores and building stores for other merchants. To handle both responsibilities efficiently, he needed to streamline daily operations. Marko, with his expertise in developing innovative technical solutions, was instrumental in this process.
The Years Before Approosters
Early 2012
Garage Days
In early 2012, Samuli embarked on his entrepreneurial journey by establishing official online stores for prominent metal and rock bands, including Nightwish, Children of Bodom, and Sonata Arctica. Within the first few months, the venture successfully signed over 20 bands.
To accommodate the business, Samuli and his family decided to renovate their garage into an operational workspace.
In the pictures: garage before and after the renovation.
Mid 2012
E-commerce Platform
The business required advanced and unique e-commerce tools to effectively manage a heavily international operation from rural Finland. To address this need, Marko joined the team to develop a custom e-commerce platform, as existing solutions did not meet our requirements. Our platform soon gained recognition from other international merchants in Finland, prompting us to open it to them as well. This expansion gave rise to a new business segment and introduced a new customer group: online store merchants.
In picture above you can see Marko in our first "office", a small room behind the garage. Picture below shows our space for shipments going out or coming in.
Late 2012
Growth of the Band Merchandise Business
As we continued to enhance our e-commerce platform, the band merchandise business experienced consistent growth. Managing over 20 online stores from a 90-square-metre garage and fulfilling daily orders required a determined and proactive approach.
Late 2012
Establishment of a New Online Store
While creating online stores for other merchants using our platform, we observed a common challenge: attracting new customers and achieving growth. We wondered if our success was facilitated by the bands' efforts in creating music and touring globally. To explore this, Samuli and his wife Tuuli launched a completely new online store specializing in women's 1950s fashion.
Mid 2013
Outgrowing the Garage
It became apparent that we soon outgrew our garage. We needed a larger warehouse to accommodate our expanding online stores and web development operations. In 2013, just a year after starting the business in the garage, we found the perfect warehouse and began the relocation process.
Mid 2013
The New Office & Warehouse
The new, larger warehouse significantly enhanced our daily operations. It allowed us to elevate our order processing capabilities, enabling us to focus on what we identified as the key area of our business: growth.
2014 →
International Logistics
As our international online business expanded, we traveled extensively, visiting numerous logistics companies and gaining insights into their systems and operations. This knowledge enabled us to further develop integrations and automations for international trade.
In pictures Samuli and Tuuli are visiting FedEx's airplane cockpit.
2015
Pink Boxes All Over Finland
Our 1950s fashion online store grew to become the largest in its niche in Finland. Custom-designed pink boxes, symbolizing our brand, were seen all over the country. As the fashion store's growth surpassed that of the band merchandise business, and with our workload increasing, we decided to find a new home for the bands. Consequently, we sold the band merchandise business at the end of 2014. It still continues to thrive and grow every year under its new ownership.
We recognized the importance of understanding the entire business process, so even our backend developer Marko gained hands-on experience with order processing and shipping.
2013 - 2019
Multiple Warehouses
Over the years, we relocated to new facilities whenever we needed more space. During this period, we launched new online stores and assisted many other online merchants in achieving their goals. Additionally, we decided to discontinue the development of our e-commerce platform, as Shopify began to offer the features we required.
2016
Shopify as the New Platform
Adopting Shopify as our new platform prompted us to re-evaluate our warehousing systems. We asked ourselves, "What can we improve? What features do we need to develop for Shopify through apps?" This line of thinking laid the foundation for the idea of a new app development company.
2014 - 2019
E-commerce Meetups
As our stores and technical solutions gained recognition, we were frequently invited to speak at various e-commerce meetups. These opportunities led to valuable new connections across the e-commerce industry, many of which continue to be significant in our professional network today.
2019
Approosters is Born
In 2019, we committed fully to app development by founding Approosters. Consequently, we sought new locations for our online stores, successfully relocating them. By 2022, we sold our last online store.
Since then, our focus has been fully dedicated to support Shopify merchants with their day-to-day operations, including order processing, logistic integrations, and more.
The Years Since Then
2019
Packrooster Shipping
First we wanted to develop a shipping app that was not only
integrating carriers to Shopify, but also serving as a powerful tool to process and ship orders. We started working on the app with a code name "Sir-pack-a-lot" in May 2019. As a Finnish company, we decided to start with integrations to carriers most used here and included these carriers early: Posti, Matkahuolto & DB Schenker.
The app - Packrooster Shipping - was published in Shopify App Store at the end of October 2019 and we started to onboard first merchants on it.
By the end of the year we had our first 10 customers using the app. Shopify was still a new thing for Finnish merchants. The real work had begun.
2020
Printrooster Order Printing
As we continued to further develop Packrooster Shipping, adding new carriers such as DHL Express, there was already a new app being built.
We knew that printing Shopify orders was important yet somewhat troubling for us and many other merchants. The small fact that you were not able to know if an order had already been printed or not was frustrating. We started to build Printrooster Order Printing to accommodate this missing feature with Shopify and other apps, but quickly realized that there were quite a few more features that we could include, to make the order processing a joy.
Printrooster Order Printing was published in Shopify App Store in May 2020 and we started welcoming merchants from all over the world.
By the end of the year there were 100 Shopify merchants using our Apps.
2021
Conversations, New Carriers & Milestones
Shopify merchants were really loving these apps! We embraced conversations with them and wanted to know more about their unique needs in their business, to expand features in our apps to be used in several different scenarios.
To Printrooster we started to implement new templating engine for orders and picking lists and added new filters and sorting rules to the print buttons.
To Packrooster we integrated new carriers, such as Shipit, GLS, Deutsche Post, PostNord, Budbee & Fiuge.
Milestones: first million shipments shipped with Packrooster Shipping and first million orders printed with Printrooster Order Printing. The merchants are really using these apps! By the end of the year there were 360 Shopify merchants using our Apps.
2022
Hardships & Rework
This was a year of some hardships in our development. We made a big decision to almost completely renew our apps, both front and back end, to better support growing amount of merchants and data, but also to be better aligned with Shopify & Polaris.
We knew that this will cause delay in our development roadmap, but we also knew that it's better to make this now than later. It didn't stop the development totally, as we managed to implement a lot of new features to the apps still, mostly for Packrooster Shipping.
By the end of the year there were 480 Shopify merchants using our apps.
2023
More Onboardings & Collaborations
The hard foundation rework was ready and we successfully deployed it in production. The new framework gave as more flexibility to implement new features, drastically hastening our development. With international carrier integrations, we were now also onboarding Shopify merchants from different countries to Packrooster Shipping, mostly from Scandinavia.
More and more merchants were onboarding our apps. We started to collaborate with many Shopify agencies, helping them solve puzzles in order processing and shipping setups for their clients. We also enhanced our co-operation with many carriers. These collaborations added more welcomed pressure to our roadmap, but with the newly reworked framework we managed to keep up the pace.
By the end of the year there were 670 Shopify merchants using our Apps.
2024
Still Walking the Same Path
The path we chose in the beginning was very clear to us, and we haven't gone stray. We still believe in same values: strong foundation and collaboration with merchants and partners. And most of all, to have fun doing it.
While building strong foundation and anticipating the future challenges isn't the fastest path to go, it is needed to be able to trust yourself. And only from that, you can be trustworthy on to others. You can't carve your name to a rock in one day. Not without the tools.
As of September 2024, our apps have been used to process over 12 million orders.
There are now over 800 customers using our apps. The work continues. And - we're having fun.
What We Do
At Approosters, we develop applications specifically for Shopify merchants. Our apps are designed to streamline order processing and shipping, significantly reducing time and complexity. With our extensive experience in managing and owning multiple Shopify stores, we confidently ensure that our solutions will provide substantial benefits to your business.
Used to process
13M+
Orders
Used daily by
900+
Shopify merchants
Apps Built for Shopify
Approoster apps are built for Shopify. With over a decade of experience with Shopify we can proudly say that we are experts with Shopify ecosystem. That is why hundreds of merchants trust us.
