Every year at DotDev, we hand out the Build Awards. Not for the biggest company or the flashiest launch, but for the partners building what matters most to merchants.
This year we are recognizing excellence across four categories: apps, storefronts, merchant impact, and community. Each one moves the ecosystem forward, and each one deserves to be seen.
This year's winners come from seven countries. Some started in a spare room. One pair met working at Pizza Hut. What they have in common is simpler than you'd think: they got close to merchants, went deep on one problem worth solving, and kept building while everything around them changed.
Michael Ray & Rachael Yaeger, Co-founders, Human NYC
Category: Storefronts
Michael and Rachael met in 2009 at an influential digital agency. They left and started Human NYC in 2013 as an art gallery in Greenpoint, then grew it into a studio when they started building websites together. Thirteen years later, their edge is brand-and-build under one roof. The storytelling they design is what they ship. That combination has drawn a roster with real range from Elijah Wood's film studio SpectreVision to beauty brands like Youth To The People and Tower 28. This award recognizes their work on Wendywin, a premium eyewear brand, whose storefront reads more editorial than catalog, using video and animation woven through the shopping experience. The craft shows in the details, from product zoom on the collection pages to size charts mapped to each specific frame. It all ladders up to the studio's own philosophy: good humans making good work for good humans.
Mike Rossi & Bill Curtis, Co-founders, Smile
Category: Apps
Smile began as an ecommerce agency hopping between platforms before going all in on Shopify. When a couple of clients wanted loyalty programs, the team took a shot at developing an app instead—completely free for the small businesses flooding onto Shopify. Ten years on, it's grown into one of the largest loyalty apps in the ecosystem. What sets them apart is that they've built an ecosystem of their own on top of Shopify's, a public API other developers plug into, while staying deeply integrated with the platform. Mike's hard-won thesis fits the moment exactly: “Merchants have vibe-coded an entire app over a weekend. So how do you differentiate? By getting very deep on one topic and getting really close with merchants.”
Dave Spanton & Sammy Isseyegh, Co-founders, Discount Kit
Category: Apps
Dave and Sammy met working at Pizza Hut (“We worked on their software, not delivering pizza”), and have built things together for more than a decade since. That trust is the foundation of Discount Kit: advanced, battle-tested discounting merchants rely on through multiple Black Fridays without worrying it'll over- or under-discount. It's also a showcase for what Shopify’s platform can do. The team built their discount-stacking logic natively on Shopify Functions, woven so deeply into how merchants run promotions that stores plan campaigns around it. It was built for Shopify from the start, and is still shipping new features.They've stayed deliberately lean, a tiny core team with support spread across continents.
Simon Wesierski & Michael Klim, Co-founders, Commerce UI
Category: Storefronts
Simon and Michael were two friends who started Commerce UI six years ago with a simple goal: build the fastest storefronts with the best design, and trust that quality brings the rest. It did, quickly becoming a team of 25, international from day one. Their obsession is the small stuff: “You cannot imagine how many discussions we have about whether we should attach this animation to the scroll or not, or if the layout is flickering.” It’s their second Build Award, and their work for Lupine is why. Interactive functionality, a complex product configurator, and B2B features all built Shopify-native in Liquid is proof they can work both edges of the platform. It's clearly a breakout year: the award news reached them mid-chaos, one co-founder eating currywurst when leaving a Linkin Park show.
Harel Ishay, Founder & CEO, Easyteam
Category: Apps
Harel bootstrapped Easyteam solo just as Shopify POS was taking off. It began as workforce management for online stores, until support tickets kept asking whether it worked with POS. “I always told them, 'sure, we're doing POS,'” he says, “and then immediately went to Google and typed: what exactly is Shopify POS?” That demand became the company's defining pivot into physical retail, with an experience so native that a new hire who can ring up a sale already knows how to clock in. They’ve unlocked high-impact retail experiences for merchants: staff management, payroll, and flexible commission management, all built to feel like part of Shopify POS rather than a bolt-on. It’s a big part of how it became one of the most popular apps for Shopify POS. And Harel sees the next frontier clearly: “With all the AI capabilities, we're super excited about the physical world, because it's a lot harder to conquer.”
Emili Horncastle, Co-founder & CMO, Zapiet
Category: Community
Emili started Zapiet 11 years ago building stores, and kept seeing the same unmet need in the forums: in-store pickup and local delivery. Their first app solved it, making them early App Store pioneers. When COVID hit, Zapiet was one of the only apps offering pickup and delivery. Shopify featured them, and the team went from 6 people to 33 in under two months, pulling in their moms and friends to triage support just to keep up. Today, it's six apps and a team spanning the globe.As the first recipient of the new community award, Emili has truly given back. Over the past year, she has brought partners together at events around the world, spoken at conferences, and shared what she's learned building Zapiet, freely and often. The relationships Emili has built in the community have taken her to unexpected places like a Vogue spread, and an 80s-inspired music video for a Brazilian pop star. “I have friends all over the world because of Shopify. I've attended weddings because of Shopify.”
Simon Corompt & Maxime Berthelot, Co-founders, Unlikely
Category: Storefronts
Simon and Maxime started Unlikely in 2016 building sites for ad agencies, not ecommerce at all. In 2020 they took on their first Shopify project, a headless build for Paris fashion brand Yse, and the relationship has continued ever since. (It's their most recent work for Yse that's recognized here). Demand exploded and they specialized fast. Today nearly all their work is custom storefronts and integrations with a deep focus on craft. Yse’s storefront was built to push what Shopify can do, with an aesthetic that makes Ysé's products feel alive rather than listed. Their vision was ambitious: “We wanted to push what was possible on mobile, to make it feel a bit native, just like the apps you install from the app store.” And to Simon, AI makes the craft more exciting, not less: “It doesn't make us obsolete, it just helps us do more interesting things and focus on what brings value.”
Adam Sharon-Zipser & Jacob Osborne, Founders, Elephant Room & Prosper Digital
Category: Merchant Impact
The first-ever joint award, and a perfect picture of the ecosystem at its best: two partner-friends who share clients and build better together. Adam got his start helping his parents—clothing sellers in Manchester—build their online store, and turned that passion into a 40-person Sydney agency with, as he likes to say, “the complete trifecta: an app on the App Store, an online store, and an agency.” Jacob's an entrepreneur many times over (Prosper is his eighth business), and he saw Shopify's future before most, backing it early. Within three months of joining the ecosystem, he had so much work he launched Prosper. A few years ago he narrowed the agency down to what it does best: Shopify design and build. He dropped marketing, SEO, and email so the team could go deep on craft, and partnered with agencies like Elephant Room for the rest. His North Star for it all: “relentlessly ambitious, profoundly human.” Together, their work helping to grow Lioness shows what real collaboration can unlock. Lioness started as a pop-up in a Sydney train station in 2009 with DTC less than 10% of their sales. Elephant Room migrated them to Shopify and grew online revenue roughly 140x over five years. Prosper then helped them optimize for the next phase of scale, lifting total sales 113% and conversion 74% within six weeks. Lioness now sells in 15 countries.
Every winner here was once a stranger to this stage. They were bootstrapping solo, landing a first client, talking their way into a project that felt impossible. Each year new names enter the winners list for a reason. The ecosystem keeps making room for the next person with a good idea and the ambition to build it. These are the partners shaping what commerce looks like next, and the list is far from finished.
