About Us
We build Shopify apps for shops that rent, sell and fix gear.
Summit & Spokes is a Portland, Oregon software company with one subject: the outdoor shop. Ski and snowboard rentals, bike fleets, the workshop bench, the register, the product planning spreadsheet nobody wants to open. We build the apps that run those parts of the business inside Shopify, so a shop gets one system instead of five, and staff spend their day with customers instead of with software.
We’re new as a company and old as a team. Our first apps, Rentals & Service, POS Filters and Budgeting & Purchase Orders, grew out of real shop floors, not a product roadmap.
Why we started
Rental and service shops need apps built specifically for them. Point of sale apps don’t know what a season pass is. The workshop lives on a clipboard. Every shop ends up stitching these together by hand, and the stitching is where the mistakes happen: the skis promised to two customers, the waiver nobody can find, the binding setting written on a sticky note.
Shopify fixed the selling part of retail for small stores. We’re here to fix the rest of it for gear shops, on the same platform, with the same care.
Meet the founder
I’m Craig Rusch, and I’ve spent more than twenty years using technology to take work off people’s plates.
Most recently I was Chief Technology Officer at Next Adventure, Portland’s four-store outdoor retailer with a 46,000-square-foot warehouse. In a little over two years we brought technology management in house, moved the whole company onto Shopify for online and in-store sales, replaced the inventory, warehouse and forecasting systems, and used AI to clear a merchandising backlog that had been growing for years. Technology spending dropped by more than thirty percent while we did it. That’s the experience this company is built on: I know what a gear shop needs from its software because I’ve run the software for one.
Before that I spent twenty years as Chief Information Officer and Security Officer at Albertina Kerr, an 800-person nonprofit serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities across more than fifty locations. When I arrived, most staff didn’t have email. When I left, we had “technology for everything,” including an Epic electronic health record system delivered under budget and ahead of schedule, and a security program that had to answer to HIPAA every day. Handling other people’s most sensitive data, carefully, for two decades, is a habit I brought with me.
And I’ve run a rental business. In 2007 I founded Kerr Bikes, a family bike rental shop on Portland’s waterfront, as a jobs program for the people Kerr serves. It ran for fourteen years, turned a profit from year three, and became the adaptive bike provider for Portland’s Biketown program. Every time our Rentals app handles a walk-up customer on a sunny Saturday, it’s drawing on those summers at the counter.
Earlier still: I was a lead on the team that built Nike.net, the site through which small retailers order Nike products; I was on the founding team of PointsBeyond, an early website for outdoor enthusiasts; and I’ve built everything from warehouse logistics software to educational apps about the solar system. I’m a Harvard graduate, a longtime board chair for the Children’s Book Bank, and the kind of parent who ends up raising $300,000 to build a soccer field.
How we work
Shops first. Every feature starts with a real shop’s problem, usually one we’ve had ourselves.
Inside Shopify, not beside it. Your products, customers, orders and payments stay where they are. Our apps add what’s missing and look like they belong.
Careful with data. We’ve lived under HIPAA. Your customers’ information gets the same respect.
Small on purpose. You’ll talk to the people who build the software. Suggestions go straight into the app, and usually ship within weeks.
Talk to us
Running a rental or service shop on Shopify, or thinking about it? We’d like to hear what’s slowing you down. Contact us or try one of our apps.
