Shipt executive shares lofty goals for Birmingham at chamber luncheon
Britney Summerville, the vice-president of community engagement for Birmingham tech firm Shipt, has a lofty goal for the Magic City.
“I would like to see Birmingham listed as a top five tech city in the next five years,” she said.
Summerville expressed this grand goal in her remarks during a virtual event hosted by the Mountain Brook Chamber of Commerce on Aug. 6.
Adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization presented what it called its first-ever “No-Show Chamber Luncheon” via videoconference.
Summerville was an early team member at Shipt, a nationwide membership-based marketplace offering same-day delivery of food and household essentials from about 100 partner retailers to nearly 200,000 shoppers in more than 5,000 U.S. cities.
“The easiest way to explain what Shipt does is we bring the store to your door,” she said.
Summerville is also the founder of Birmingham Bound, an organization that operates under the Shipt umbrella and, among other goals, seeks to recruit tech companies to locate here.
The mission of Birmingham Bound “is to make a lasting impact on the success and awareness of our technology ecosystem,” she said.
Part of the impetus for Shipt to create Birmingham Bound was the company’s highly publicized $550 million acquisition by giant retailer Target in December 2017.
A few months after the deal was announced, Shipt made a commitment to local, county and state officials to remain in Birmingham and create another 880 jobs.
The company believed that it had to take part in building the local talent pool, Summerville said.
“We need to make Birmingham attractive to people with talent,” she said. “We don’t need people to graduate from Mountain Brook High School and go off to Harvard and stay away forever.”
“We also need talent going to school locally,” said Summerville, who noted that Auburn University and the University of Alabama lose about 60% of their graduates to other states.
In addition, Birmingham Bound seeks to “lift up tech companies that are here to make it clear that you don’t have to go to the Bay Area to grow tech,” Summerville said.
The organization is also “spreading the word across the nation that Birmingham is a tech ecosystem that should be on their radar,” she said.
The acquisition of Shipt by Target helped to spread that message, Summerville said.
“The day the deal was announced was a fantastic day for the Birmingham area,” Summerville said.
What had been “just a little pipe dream” for Shipt founder Bill Smith a couple of years before turned into a $550 million acquisition, she said.
“Birmingham is getting on the minds and the lips of the right people,” Summerville said.
There were only about 100 employees at the company then, but Shipt now has about 1,000 people at its headquarters in downtown Birmingham.
A Montgomery native, Summerville attended Auburn University and was formerly the senior vice-president for service at Daxko.
WEARING MASKS
Mayor Stewart Welch III opened the event by thanking people for honoring Gov. Kay Ivey’s statewide mandate to wear masks to help stop COVID-19, despite the fact that it’s “a lot of trouble.”
“I think that’s going to be very important to keep our businesses open and operating,” he said.
NEW MEMBERS
Tonya Jones, president of the chamber, welcomed nearly a dozen new members to the Chamber: Atomic, Amparo Fine Living, Sarah Burkhart of Realty South, Alisha Crossley Photography, Birmingham Works, Alabama Education Association, Sol y Luna, Vaughan and Company, Gunn Dermatology, 10x Physiotherapy and Great American Cookie & Marble Slab Creamery.