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Shopify

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Interactive Installation
Experiential Design
Motion Design
RFID exhibit Solarflare built for Shopify at DMEXCO 2019 and Paris Retail Week, making the commerce platform tangible through physical product interactions.
Making a commerce platform physical
Shopify came to us to design an engaging exhibit for DMEXCO 2019 and Paris Retail Week, using RFID to make their commerce platform tangible on the trade-show floor.The challenge with any developer-facing platform at a trade show is translation: the people walking the floor are not necessarily engineers, and a live dashboard means little without context. We built an experience where visitors picked up a physical product tagged with RFID. The moment they lifted it, the Shopify platform responded on screen. Inventory updated, a product page rendered, a checkout flow appeared. The technology became transparent. What visitors saw was commerce working, not software running.
Mechanics that match the message
RFID is a familiar technology, but the interaction design here needed to feel effortless and immediate rather than gimmicky. We calibrated the response latency so the platform reaction felt instantaneous with the physical gesture, no perceptible lag between lifting the product and seeing the screen change. That timing was critical. Any delay and the cause-and-effect relationship breaks, and the whole point of the experience is that relationship.The physical objects were designed to look like real retail stock, not props. That decision reinforced the core message: Shopify is infrastructure for real-world commerce, not a digital abstraction.
Scale across two major shows
Running the same experience across DMEXCO and Paris Retail Week gave Shopify consistent brand presence at two of Europe's most commercially significant retail and marketing events, reaching different audience profiles with the same core demonstration.The exhibit generated measurable floor traffic at both shows, with dwell times well above the trade-show average. More importantly, it gave Shopify's sales and partner teams a concrete demonstration tool that sparked qualified conversations rather than requiring them to explain abstract platform capabilities from scratch. The RFID mechanic did the first thirty seconds of every pitch automatically.

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