Though the pandemic slowed customer buying habits in its early days due to 
uncertainty, for Bastian Solutions, it came back with a vengeance in the last quarter of the year.
That’s according to Eric Cameron, vice president of sales for Bastian Solutions in Louisville. Bastian Solutions, a Toyota Advanced Logistics company, specializes immaterial handling services and specifically in Louisville, software development. By the end of the year, the company will hire 400 more people to its workforce to help keep pace with the demand triggered by the pandemic.
Greg Conner, vice president of global sales and marketing for the company, said the industry in general is growing, but Covid-19 acted as a catalyst for that growth as more people got comfortable buying products online. He said the company was already seeing significant increases in the ecommerce space in the last five or 10 years, but the pandemic skyrocketed that activity.
The way he describes the sudden surge in business to people when they ask what the last year has been like, Conner said it’s like the industry collectively took a quarter off in the beginning of last year.
“Then the realization hit like a freight train that people’s buying patterns have completely changed and it’s going to impact this industry in a very positive way, and we need to respond now, “Conner said in an interview. “You had all these companies put projects on hold, and now they’re (realizing), ‘Not only do we need to do this project, we need to do this project times 10 what we had thought we were going to do.’”
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