It feels like longer, but it was only two years ago we co-founded Molly. When we started, we knew two things:
- We have to work in person — in a space that’s ours, with the people we love to work with.
- We have to be excited about every project we take on.
The first one worked out. The second one (mostly) worked out. We didn’t have a clear plan of what we wanted to build with Molly, but we trusted we’d find what we were looking for through the work. We knew that working with a team of people we respect and trust meant that we could confidently take on any challenge that came our way.
Over the past two years, we’ve learned more than we have in any previous project or role. And simultaneously we’ve created what has been the best work of our careers.
We’ve partnered with over 28 brands and by chance, we found ourselves running a studio in the middle of this AI explosion. Over the past two years, half of our projects have been AI-related.
Along the way, Molly has built a deep library of frameworks and strategy not only for the process of how we work, but in our theory for how products and the web should interact, behave, and disclose content. This, along with AI’s influence on it, is something we’ve spent countless hours thinking and writing about.
Sharing our writing and un-polished demos has been one of the core focuses in our studio. And we've invited people together, into our space, as a way for them to share their thesis' and demos. Between Demo Nights and Behind the Scenes, we've had hundreds of people show up to our studio in Brooklyn.
One of these events was hosted together with our friends at Shopify, and was amid a project collaboration we had with them.
We’ve always been excited about Shopify and admired their vision. Particularly in the way we believe in its defensibility moat in the AI future. Shopify is the repository for most of the world’s SKUs. This, we believe, will become increasingly valuable as individual applications become less relevant and actions (especially commerce) take place inside AI interactions.
The studio model excels in a lot of relationships, but one thing it’s not ideal for: long-term, deep impact across an entire organization. And this is exactly what Carl Rivera and Tobi Lütke approached us about. How can Molly and Shopify work closer to solve the deepest challenges at Shopify?
To do this, Shopify has acquired the Molly team to form the new Product Design Studio within the organization. The team is hyper-focused on one question: What's the future of commerce if we built it from the ground up with AI from the start?
Our founding team is Yael Bienenstock, McLane Teitel, Melike Turgut, Johnny Slack, and Jesper Vos. We’re beyond excited to embark on this new mission together— in-person with people we love to work with.
The Shopify Product Design Studio will have more work to share soon.
— Marvin and Jaytel