Katherine Homuth used to want to start a company. That was the focus of her ambition when she founded her first venture, ShopLocket, more than a decade ago. At the time, she was doing Shopify theme development for clients and noticed that it was not yet easy to embed the e-commerce platform into other company’s sites.
She developed her business around the concept of a “buy” button. “Tell me the problem you’re actually trying to solve.” “It was a very derivative idea,” Homuth said recently.
“I thought, other people are doing digital commerce, so maybe if I make a slight change on it, it will make me rich. And I think that’s how so many people start.” But Homuth now recommends a different starting point, one that helped her launch her current company, , with the ambition of revolutionizing the global apparel industry.
She believes entrepreneurs and investors have become too focused on chasing prevailing trends, whether it’s digital commerce, Bitcoin or AI. The secret to her success, Homuth believes, is focusing on a problem, rather than a goal. “I started to become extremely jaded that so many people I was chatting with seemed to be doing what I call ‘technology for technology’s sake,’” she said.
“Tell me the problem you’re actually trying to solve.” In February 2024, Homuth’s company SRTX announced the opening of its new global headquarters in Montréal, a 300,000-square-foot facility that will accommodate the entirety of its manufact.
