A Beautiful Christmas Shop Window you can actually shop

Every December, people stand on a cold pavement in London and stare at shop windows. Whole families. Nobody is buying anything. They're just looking, because for a few weeks the windows are the best thing on the street.

Then they go home, open the same shop's website, and get a grid of products on a white page.

So we built a shop window you can actually shop.

Have a go below. Let the street arrive, step up to a window, and tap Sound on for the music (it's worth it).

Open it full screen

What you're looking at

Mount Row is a London fashion house that we made up. None of it is real. Not the shop, not the street, not the cab that drives past, not the coats.

You arrive across a snowy street at night. A light comes on upstairs, a toy train does a lap of the middle window, and the name lights up over the door. Then it's yours: step up to any of the 3 windows and everything in it is there to buy. Pick a size, add it to your bag, or click a picture to see the piece properly.

What it's for

A collection launch. Christmas is the obvious one, but it's the same job for a new season, a collaboration or a sale: you want people to feel like they've arrived somewhere, not landed on a list.

It's designed to sit on top of Shopify. Every piece in a window would be a real product, every size a real variant, and the bag and checkout would be Shopify's own. The window is the way in. The shop behind it is the one you already have.

How we made it

1. One photograph of the shop, then one for each window

The store front is a single picture made with AI. Our first plan was to make that one picture and simply zoom into it when you step up to a window. It looked awful. Zoom into a wide picture and everything in the window turns to mush.

So each window got its own photograph, made on its own and then fitted into the glass of the store front. Step up and you're looking at a proper picture of that window, not a blown-up corner of a bigger one.

2. One film to cross the street

The arrival is a single shot of 10 seconds. It starts further back and pushes in, a black cab crosses in front of you, a Christmas tree lights up in an upstairs window, and it finishes on exactly the picture the page then shows. That last part matters most: the film ends, the page takes over, and you shouldn't be able to tell where.

The snow falls in the film, and when the film stops the snow carries on, because by then it's the web page drawing it.

3. A window that moves

The big London stores always have one window that's alive, so ours had to as well. The middle window is a short film of a toy train going round a tower of gift boxes, on a loop, sat inside the photograph of the shop.

4. Proper pictures of the things you can buy

At first the product pictures were cut out of the window photographs. They looked like what they were. So we made a set of studio shots instead: all 9 pieces in one go, on one sheet, so the light and the background match, and then cut the sheet into 9.

5. Music, and credits that keep time

The music is an original 60 second piece: piano, celesta, strings and a few sleigh bells. The opening credits are cut to it, so each name arrives on a beat and the dot on the Sprint logo lands on a note. You'd never notice it. You'd notice if it wasn't there.

6. The sign writing

The name over the door and the gold lettering on the glass above it aren't in the photograph. They're drawn by the page, which means they're pin sharp and could say anything. A different collection, a different year, a different shop.

What went wrong (plenty)

This wasn't the first idea. We built a completely different Christmas experiment before this one, looked at it, and agreed it wasn't special enough. It's in a drawer.

The first arrival walked into a different shop. We asked for a walk along the pavement and a turn to face the store. About 4 seconds in, the shop had quietly become another shop. The fix was to ask for less: same shop, same angle, just start further away and move in.

The train stopped for the taxi. In one take the train paused politely while the cab went past, which is good manners but not how trains work. Then we tried laying our train film over the top of the arrival film, and the window juddered against the street. In the end we chose the take where the train simply runs, and let the page pick it up from there.

The sign didn't fit. The first name over the door ran across the carved edges of the panel it was meant to sit inside. Small thing. It's exactly the kind of small thing that makes a made-up shop look made up.

And the lettering on the glass took 4 goes. Too big, then not quite centred, then the two lines touched, then the gold had a shadow it didn't need. It's now measured, not judged by eye (#lessonlearned).

Would this work for a real shop?

Yes, and it'd be better. We had to invent the shop, the clothes and the street. A real brand has all three already. The windows could be photographed for real, or built from the product shots you've got, and redressed for every campaign.

Built by Sprint

Mount Row is an experiment from Sprint, the web development studio that's part of Clicky Group. It's one of a series we're building to show what's possible now when a good idea, a small team and the latest AI tools get some time together.

AI made the pictures, the films and the music. People chose them, directed them and checked every frame.

Got a collection to launch?

If you've something coming and you'd like people to stop and stare at it, talk to Sprint. We'll show you what your window could look like.