Writing Shopify’s culture into a million square feet of concrete.

Shopify has offices around the world, but none big enough to hold the whole company. Its 7,600 employees work remote-first from 43 countries, and research shows the cost. Remote workers are individually the most engaged group, but distributed work weakens the connections between them, and that makes remote teams less likely to produce breakthrough ideas. For a company growing more than 30% a year, Summit couldn’t be a morale event. It had to be where Shopifolk rebuilt those connections.

Working in partnership with Shopify, we built a world out of what they actually do, turning a million square feet of Exhibition Place into 20 custom-designed spaces, each a Shopify behaviour made physical. The Garage was for fearless experimentation, Unit 404 for ego-less collaboration, and NetZone 2000 put the event’s 22+ miles of fibre on display. Every detail was written in Shopify’s own language, from a fountain shaped like its iconic bag to a dog park named for its support bot. All built and executed while the FIFA World Cup was still tearing down on the same grounds.

It resonated. Hack Days projects rose 46% to an all-time high of 2,118, solo projects fell from 45% to 35% as teams came together to create, and a record 997 people hacked for the first time. Best of all, 11.1 million lines of dead code were removed – surpassing the previous record by a staggering 10x.