On the evening of March 13, 2020, I received a call from Paniceous, the company behind the burger chain “Peter Pane.” The question: Did I have immediate availability for an urgent project? Earlier that day, it had been announced that all restaurants in Germany would have to close due to the pandemic starting March 22. Peter Pane wanted to launch a delivery service within days to maintain at least some revenue.

Two agencies had already turned them down — the planned launch date was March 16, meaning we had just one weekend. Luckily, Nils and Björn, my two long-time companions from empuxa, were free and willing to help. We got started that same Friday evening.

  • I set up a Shopify store and developed a custom theme for Peter Pane.

  • Nils imported the entire offline product catalog into Shopify.

  • Björn took care of project management and legal coordination.

Wireframe of the Shopify shop.

After just one day, we had the first version up and running — but soon faced several challenges:

  1. Delivery radius: Customers should only be able to order if they were near a Peter Pane location.

  2. Variant limit: The wide variety of burger combinations quickly hit Shopify’s technical limits.

  3. Logistics: The restaurants had kitchens, but no delivery infrastructure. Bikes were needed.

We solved the delivery radius issue using a Shopify add-on that restricted orders to a 5 km radius. For the variant issue, we contacted Shopify directly and temporarily reduced the menu. Thanks to our existing contacts from the “Lease A Bike” project, we reached out to Swapfiets — who jumped in and provided bikes on very short notice.

On March 19 — after training all restaurants and preparing the marketing campaign — the delivery service went live. The demand was huge, and the mood within the team and the company was full of optimism.

Live view five minutes after launch.

This project was a perfect example of rapid, pragmatic execution under extreme time pressure. Within just a few days, we delivered not only a technical solution but also the operational structures needed — showing what’s possible when everyone pulls together.

Sad fact

The launch was so successful that the provider of the location add-on blocked our access shortly after going live. His AWS setup couldn’t handle the traffic — he had only calculated costs for small shops with low visitor numbers.

To the entire team at empuxa and Paniceous: Thank you for your incredible trust, speed, and team spirit during those intense days. Working with you was not only effective – it was truly inspiring. 🙌