Altimize Offers Ecommerce Apps to Retailers

Bryan Howe, co-owner and co-founder of Altimize

Altimize, a new startup leasing space at the Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub in North Little Rock, offers a simple platform for retailers to create apps, allowing their customers to shop their stores online. 

Co-owner and co-founder Bryan Howe said the retailers who sign up with his company get a username and password to log in with. They are charged a one-time setup fee and a monthly fee for the service.

The retailers access a dashboard when they log in and manage things like inventory through it. “It’s pretty straightforward,” Howe said.

Altimize was born two years ago after Howe’s dad suggested that he and his brother, Ethan, break into the app-creating industry. His dad is Richard Howe, CEO of Inuvo in Little Rock. 

The brothers started building apps for different businesses. Howe said they found their niche when they built their first e-commerce app for Riffraff of Fayetteville.

“It was kind of at that moment when I realized that I didn’t want to build apps for businesses and just have them just sitting on the app store, and nobody downloading them. I didn’t want to build an app for a business and have it not help them,” he said.

So, about a year ago, Bryan and Ethan Howe refocused their company on the ecommerce-for-retailers niche.

Now, 80,000 people use apps functioning on the Altimize platform to shop different stores all over the country, including in Arkansas, Texas and California.

The startup recently snagged Shop the Rage, which is run by two Arkansas women, as a client. Another big client is The Impeccable Pig boutique. The startup is also working on a deal with what could result in serving its first out-of-the-country client, Howe said.

Along with the brothers, Mary Mendelsohn and Frank Whitmore work for Altimize.

The secret to its success, Howe said, has been “just hard work, late nights. You’ve got to sacrifice weekends. You’ve got to just take the plunge.”

There were failures along the way too, but the entrepreneurs learned from those, he said.

Howe also said the Hub’s mentors, pitch contests and being surrounded by smart and supportive people, including other entrepreneurs, has helped the company grow.

He said the best part of his job is being able to employ people, which he called humbling. Howe also said he enjoys owning something and seeing that people all over the world are downloading apps created by Altimize.

Howe’s path to entrepreneurship is a strange one though.

He attended the University of British Columbia in Canada for three years to major in forestry. Howe transferred to the University of Mississippi for a semester to study marine biology, then he returned to Little Rock and graduated from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock with a biology degree.

Howe’s background in technology comes from working as an intern for his dad over the summers.