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A custom Shopify Hydrogen storefront for a Warsaw techno club
Project goal
To give Smolna an online home as distinctive as the club itself: a single storefront that sells its events, merch and DJ programme while taking as much manual work off the team as possible.
Our scope
UX/UI design
Development
Systems integration
Project duration
August–November 2025
Technologies used
Shopify
Hydrogen
React Router
TypeScript
Client
Smolna
A club that is far more than a ticket booth
Smolna is a techno club in the middle of Warsaw, tucked into a pre-war tenement on Smolna street. It is not only somewhere you buy a ticket. There is a members' circle with early access to shows, a merch line, an academy for DJs and a pass that puts people behind the decks on real stages. No off-the-shelf shop theme was ever going to carry all of that, so we designed and built the whole thing from scratch on Shopify with Hydrogen.
Designed from zero, so it looks like nowhere else
A club like Smolna has a strong identity. A generic storefront would have flattened it. So the site was drawn from a blank page, every screen designed for this club and no other. That is why it does not look like any Shopify store you have landed on before. Online, it carries the same character the venue has in person.
Hydrogen for a storefront that is fast and fully ours
We built it on Hydrogen, Shopify's own storefront framework, which runs on React Router. It let us design the front-end exactly how we wanted while keeping Shopify's commerce engine underneath to handle orders, payments and stock. For Smolna that means a site which is completely bespoke and still loads in an instant, without the compromises a heavy theme would have forced on the design.
Smolna Friends: first in line for tickets
The club runs on its community, so the store puts that at the centre. Anyone can register as one of Smolna Friends, the circle that gets to buy tickets to concerts and festivals in presale, ahead of the general on-sale. It turns the shop into more than a checkout. It becomes the way into the club's inner track.
DJ Pass: selling stage time, not products
DJ Pass is where the store stops behaving like a normal shop. It is a subscription that gives people the real conditions to grow as DJs, from professional practice rooms through to the club's own stages during live events. Selling access to a room and a slot, rather than a boxed product, is not something a commerce platform expects out of the box. We modelled it so it sits naturally in the same store as a t-shirt or a ticket.
We bent Shopify to fit the club, not the other way round
A techno club's catalogue looks nothing like a fashion brand's. An event has stages, line-ups and dates. A pass has sessions. So we used Shopify's metafields to reshape the product and event schemas around the way Smolna actually thinks about its world, instead of squeezing the club into a standard product layout. Where the platform needed extending, we brought in apps from the Shopify marketplace to meet the business needs, so the club got what it wanted without custom-building every last piece.
Integrations that take the busywork off the team
Running a club is enough work without hand-processing every order. So we wired up payments, deliveries and event handling to run on their own as far as they can. Orders move through without someone at Smolna keying them in by hand, which leaves the team free to put its energy into the nights themselves rather than the admin behind them.
Reliability came first, so we advised Shopify
Smolna had been here before, on WordPress and WooCommerce. That setup gave everyone grief. It bugged out, it hung, it made life harder for the owners running it and for the people trying to use it. This time they wanted a backoffice they could trust, one backed by a large company that would keep developing it and keep it secure. We advised Shopify for exactly that reason. With the commerce platform in safe hands, we could pour all of our effort into the storefront instead of nursing the plumbing behind it. We are the first to admit that Shopify and Hydrogen are not the right fit for every kind of e-commerce. For Smolna they work superbly, which is the proof the call was right.
Outcome
Smolna got a storefront that sells its whole world and mostly runs itself. The club now has one place online that holds everything it does, the events, the merch, the membership and the DJ programme, on a site that looks like nowhere else and loads in an instant. Just as importantly, it runs with far less manual work behind the scenes, so the team can stay focused on the club.
Visit smolna38.org
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