Creativity Meets Commerce: Lessons From Kollektif Studios Founder Alina Jo Suedi

In this exclusive feature, Alina Jo Suedi, Founder of Kollektif Studios and PUBLIK, CEO of ListAid, and Founding Partner at Linkable, shares how businesses can strengthen their e-commerce strategies, build engaging product experiences, and drive sustainable growth through creativity, technology, and innovation. A Toronto-based entrepreneur with an MBA from Imperial College London, Alina brings extensive experience in commerce, revenue operations, and business strategy, including previous roles at Shopify and Ownr, an RBCx company.

Through Kollektif Studios, Alina supports global brands with creative merchandise design and production, while PUBLIK specializes in Shopify-powered B2B product experiences. As CEO of ListAid, an AI-powered pricing and listing platform for second-hand sellers, and Founding Partner at Linkable, a Shopify creator and affiliate marketing app, Alina combines entrepreneurship, AI, and digital commerce expertise to help businesses improve operational efficiency, strengthen customer engagement, and unlock new opportunities for growth.

What inspired you to co-found Kollektif Studios, and what gap did you want to address?

I started Kollektif as a side hustle in my Toronto apartment. While furnishing my apartment and kitchen, I saw that many items were disposable and plastic, so I tried my best to source sustainably and invest in things that would last longer than their plastic counterparts, like reusable straws, bamboo dish brushes and cotton canvas grocery bags. Kollektif then became a retailer with circularity at the forefront. We partnered with organizations like Tree Canada, Ecologi and OneTribe so that with every purchase, a percentage of the profits was allocated to planting new trees and preserving existing trees in rainforest regions. I then started making apparel, which led to our first branded collab with Kotn in Toronto, a fully traceable streetwear line made with Egyptian cotton that helped save over 3,000 trees. From there, companies started reaching out to place corporate orders for events and teams, so we followed demand. The gap I wanted to address was clear. We built Kollektif to transform corporate merchandise from disposable items into high-quality, sustainable design pieces people actually hold onto, keeping things out of landfill and in circularity longer. It’s proof that starting small with a clear purpose leads to long-term impact.

How has your experience at Shopify and RBCx shaped your approach to helping businesses grow?

Being at Shopify and Ownr, I was able to see first-hand how entrepreneurs start, launch and grow businesses. Working at Ownr was essentially an MBA in Canadian entrepreneurship. It demystified the entire setup process for me. I saw how tools like Ownr eliminate the barrier to entry by handling legal registrations, paperwork and compliance automatically, while giving founders access to discounts and resources. Ownr’s recently released The Canadian Side Hustles Report 2026 that found that nearly 1 in 4 Canadians are side hustling, yet over 40% aren’t sure whether they should incorporate and nearly 40% don’t understand the legal requirements. Understanding how easy it can actually be to make a business official gave me the confidence to treat Kollektif like a serious venture from day one, even when it was still operating out of my living room on weekends. Ownr and RBCx gave me the legal and structural knowledge of running a corporation. Being inside Shopify then helped me see how the biggest brands on the planet manage millions in GMV per month, and gave me the technical knowledge of building and running an e-commerce ecosystem at scale. This helped me systemize our business, but also help our customers create their own distribution systems to get their merch into the hands of their clients.

What should founders prioritize to turn a strong brand into a sustainable e-commerce business?

Systems, systems, systems! Making sure you have AI, automation, agents and the right systems in place to run your back office, so you can focus on your customers and your brand, is the most important thing. That’s especially important when 28% of Canadian side hustlers say fitting their business around work and life is a major challenge, according to the same Ownr report. The other thing that is often overlooked is your numbers: your margins and your turnover. Knowing the velocity at which your business turns over protects your runway, your ability to produce for your customers and your ability to pay your people. With respect to CSR and sustainability, it’s about adding another layer of scrutiny and due diligence with the manufacturers, partners and suppliers you’re working with. It goes a long way, and it’s a step we take for our customers and for our own retail line. Lastly, I’d encourage founders to expand their range carefully. A focused collection of products made well and produced in sensible quantities protects cash, reduces waste and gives the brand a clearer point of view. At Kollektif, producing the right quantities is better for a client’s budget and for the environment than over-ordering to chase a lower unit price.

Where can AI and automation genuinely help smaller businesses—and where is human expertise still essential?

Lean in, learn and embrace the uncertainty. Don’t be afraid of it. AI is most useful where work is repetitive, data-heavy and slows good people down. At Kollektif, we automated much of our creative feedback and approval workflow, which saved hundreds of hours of manual coordination. Through ListAid, the AI-powered pricing and listing platform I lead for the charity retail sector, shops use AI to price and list donated items faster and more consistently, so staff and volunteers can spend more time with customers and on the cause. For smaller businesses, practical starting points include customer service triage, product descriptions, inventory forecasting, bookkeeping and reporting. Human expertise remains essential wherever judgment and taste are involved. AI can generate dozens of design options in minutes, but deciding which one suits a brand, a client relationship or a cultural moment still takes experience. People are also needed to build trust, negotiate, handle difficult customer conversations with care and set a company’s direction. Use AI to remove friction from operations while protecting the parts of the business where your own perspective is what customers are paying for.

What has building your own ventures taught you about balancing creativity, customer experience, and commercial results?

Building Kollektif taught me that creativity, customer experience and commercial results have to be planned together. During my MBA at Imperial College, I was flooded with orders and working through dinner. I was drowning, so my wife joined the business in 2024 to help me, and dinners became more engaging when I wasn’t ignoring her while working on a hoodie design. That period taught me three things. Creativity needs structure, so every project now starts with a brief covering the audience, budget, timeline and what success looks like. Customer experience is where creativity becomes real, through clear communication and care over quality, sizing and delivery. Commercial results protect the creative work, so we track margins and cash flow. That balance helped us grow into a global creative studio and launch PUBLIK, Kollektif’s sister company, which builds online and offline product experiences for B2B brands on Shopify. PUBLIK is also a newsletter and community where e-commerce enthusiasts and creatives connect, share their learnings and learn from ours. I continue working on Kollektif in my spare time while focusing on ListAid, because we expanded our cap table with Ownr’s help and brought on investors and partners to grow and manage the business.

Disclaimer:

The views and opinions expressed in this interview are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of CanadianSME Small Business Magazine. Our platform is dedicated to fostering dialogue and sharing insights that inspire and empower small and medium-sized businesses across Canada.