Experiential Marketing Lead (Head of Shopify Spaces, London)

We believe brand is built in the moments people remember, and few moments stick like being in the room. Events are among the hardest things in marketing to attribute and among the easiest to remember. Nobody decides to start a business because of an ad. They decide because they met someone, heard something, tried something, or saw what was possible up close. We want Shopify to be where that happens.

Shopify is coming to London with its first permanent London Space: a hub for the people turning ideas into companies, side hustles into million-pound brands, and local communities into global commerce movements. On the surface, this will be a beautiful room where Shopify hosts founder talks, product education, retail pop-ups, product launches, and cultural moments. The real job is more interesting: make the Space proof that the future of commerce is already happening here.

OurNew York Space has shown what happens when commerce and culture are woven together: 100K+ annual visitors, high-signal brand and creator activations, and moments people keep talking about after they leave, from celebrity-founder pop-ups to tent-pole activations around Marathon Weekend and Fashion Week. London deserves its own version, not a copy/paste of what we have already done. It needs someone with the taste and nerve to make it feel unmistakably of the city.

We’re hiring a Head of Spaces, London to build the experiential program strategy for the Space and run the room: programming, production, community, operations, team, partners, and the culture and quality bar. Your work will help entrepreneurs in London become more successful, make Shopify’s role in retail commerce impossible to miss, and turn the Space into a brand channel that travels far beyond the people who were there in person.

If your instinct is to maximize the calendar, this will be a frustrating role. If your instinct is to ask what people will still be talking about in a month, it will not.

What you’ll do

• Build the London strategy for Shopify Spaces. Define the programming thesis, roadmap, budget, KPI model, and operating cadence for a Space whose job is to make Shopify unmistakably useful and culturally relevant for London entrepreneurs, retailers, creators, and commerce communities.

• Make the case for why Spaces matter. Turn the London Space into a strategic asset for Shopify: a place where entrepreneurs get more successful, our role in retail and commerce becomes tangible, and the brand earns attention because the work is useful, surprising, and worth sharing.

• Build the system, not just the calendar. Establish how ideas are sourced, briefed, greenlit, produced, marketed, measured, and, when they are not strong enough, killed.

• Act as curator-in-chief. Be the gatekeeper for only “hell yes” opportunities. Program a mix of pop-ups, founder salons, product education, retail experiments, community dinners, workshops, talks, launches, and cultural moments that feel inevitable, not busy.

• Make London feel like London. Stay close to the founders, retailers, creatives, agencies, communities, neighbourhoods, and brands shaping commerce in the city. Spot the people worth backing before they are obvious.

• Produce moments people repeat. Own the end-to-end experience with your team, including the tiny details people remember without knowing why. The work should be strong enough in the room and interesting enough to travel on social afterwards.

• Use the product, not just the logo. Make Shopify’s commerce platform visible in retail experiments and pop-up infrastructure, from Point of Sale to Shop App moments like geo-gated drops, merchant storytelling, inventory, payments, and checkout.

• Build the team. Hire, manage, and develop the soon-to-be-built London Spaces team, including senior event producers, event operations, and partnership marketing roles.

• Own the partner and vendor ecosystem. Establish and manage relationships with experiential agencies, freelancers, fabricators, AV teams, caterers, staffing partners, security, and local collaborators who determine whether an idea survives contact with reality.

• Run the machine. Own the practical reality of a permanent Space, including budgets, security, storage, AV, maintenance, rituals, and operating standards that keep the Space sharp every day.

• Measure what actually matters. Attendance, qualified community growth, pipeline influence, product engagement, partner value, and earned attention all matter. So do the harder-to-measure moments that make people feel inspired, connected, and more likely to build with Shopify.

What we’re looking for

• Founder-grade experiential judgement. You have built events, spaces, festivals, pop-ups, communities, or cultural programs where the stakes were real and the details mattered. You know because you have done it, not because you supervised from a distance.

• Taste, demonstrably. A body of work you can point to, defend, and critique honestly.

• Cultural fluency in London. You know when to show up and when to sit out. You understand where entrepreneurs, retailers, creators, and communities actually gather, not just where trend reports say they do.

• Production fluency. Credibility with the vendors and partners who make the work real. You can speak confidently with fabricators, AV teams, caterers, staffing partners, agencies, security, and landlords.

• Systems thinking. You can hold a three-year ambition and a broken microphone in the same afternoon. You build the process that lets creative work scale without sanding off its edge.

• Senior influence. You can advise executives and make a case with sharp reasoning rather than consensus theatre.

• Operational nerve. You are calm inside complexity and can make order out of chaos.

• Curious about commerce and technology. You do not need to be a Shopify expert on day one. You do need to care about entrepreneurs, retail, culture, and the pace of change in commerce.

This role probably is not for you if your strongest work is executing someone else’s event brief inside an established machine. We need someone who can design the operating system for a new Space, set a high creative bar, know which opportunities deserve a hard no, and still break the pattern when the right idea comes along.

Practical details

• This is a hybrid London-based role. Expect to spend more time on site in year one while building out the strategy, operating rhythm, and team.

• At full operation, expect to work from the London Space approximately three days a week, with flexibility around major activations.

• Some programming will happen at night or on weekends. This is part of the role.

• Occasional travel may be required.

How to apply

No cover letters. Send a CV or portfolio link if it helps us understand your work. In the application below, we're going to ask these two questions. These questions are about taste, cultural understanding, and how you see London.

1. Who would make the line go around the block? Name one relatively unheard-of London-based brand, business, creator, founder, community, or shop you would partner with for the Space. What would you build with them, who would come, and why should Shopify be the one to host it?

2. Where do London entrepreneurs actually hang out? We’re new to London. Give us a short map, list, voice note, deck, or memo of the physical places, rooms, shops, studios, communities, and neighbourhoods we should understand before opening. Tell us the five you would visit first and why.