The snowboard shop that led to the creation of Shopify was Snowdevil.
In 2004, Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake set out to sell snowboarding equipment online through a store called Snowdevil. Lütke, a programmer, found the available e-commerce software too restrictive and expensive, so he built a custom storefront himself using Ruby on Rails.
The founders soon realized that the software behind Snowdevil could be more valuable than the snowboard shop itself. They adapted it into a hosted platform that would let other merchants create online stores without building their own technical infrastructure. Shopify launched publicly in 2006; its name combines “shop” with “simplify.”
A common mix-up is treating Snowdevil as Shopify’s original name. Snowdevil was the online snowboard retailer, while Shopify was the e-commerce software developed from the store’s needs. The Snowdevil experiment therefore became the practical origin story for a much broader commerce platform.