Stripe’s miniature, motorised city is a model marvel and tribute to the hidden world of commerce

Imagine this: an entire city built on an eight foot diameter table with 15 major buildings, eight physical motorised elements such as trains, radar fishes and a blimp that slowly glides through the sky, featuring over 100 mini figures that populate the city. Now the image is in your head, forget it, because Stripe, a company that builds financial infrastructure for some of the world’s most innovative companies, has gone and done it already. For Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Giving Tuesday, Stripe has created the ultimate tribute to the invisible machinery that moves money around the world – a miniature city that encapsulates the magnitude of capital.

Over the financially busy period, the interactive Stripe City is being live streamed before being archived for people who are too busy shopping to enjoy later. As the city moves, spins and turns, screens share live data which influences how the city operates. Even the lighting shifts from night to dawn and day to dusk, becoming an analogue SimCity that works in real time. Following last year’s “retro machine”, an interactive website full of old school dials and segment displays which managed live-streamed data from BFCM (Black Friday and Cyber Monday), this year’s ups the ante, entertaining and cheerleading businesses during “the most important weekend of the year for millions of business running on Stripe”.

“This year we wanted something even more tangible. Stripe builds infrastructure – the pipes, roads and rails of commerce that move around 1.3% of global GDP around the world – so we decided to instantiate that in a physical city,” says interactive and visual designer David Jacoviello. “The idea is that the city represents the world of Stripe, including all the wonderful companies building on top of our infrastructure as well as our products, publishing efforts and a few friends.”

So how was it done? The creative team behind this feat (Philipp Antoni, Devin Jacoviello and Travis McCall to name a few) spent very little time on digital mockups, instead choosing to build paper mockups to get a better sense of the actual physical scale. Whilst the set was handcrafted by a crew of skilled model makers, the internal web team designed and moulded the digital experience which takes viewers right into this bustling city. The model marvel leans into our collective love for dioramas and childhood materials such as paper, foam, cardboard and acrylic paints – in essence, Stripe moves away from the soullessness of some contemporary financial design work and goes back to the retro charm of hand made joy. Not only that, but over the lucrative weekend, a crew of animators will be on the set 24/7 to make sure the experience feels truly alive. Mind-boggling.

“This kind of project is only possible if you have a culture like Stripe’s, which takes the work very seriously, but ourselves not at all seriously,” says Michael Jeter, head of Stripe’s creative studio. “As a creative team, it’s much easier to push the envelope when there’s absolute clarity about the overall mission and worldview of the company. When we put this idea in front of Patrick Collison (CEO of Stripe), he didn’t hesitate for a second. That’s not surprising when you consider that last week our publishing arm announced our latest book, Maintenance of Everything and launched a print magazine Works in Progress.”

When it comes to creative marketing around annual events, Stripe’s design team have gone above and beyond by finding an explorative and wholesome way to celebrate their partners, whilst also involving viewers who may not even have much interest in economics. As a way of showing how deeply embedded capital, finances and cash flows are in our culture, Stripe takes us on a tour through our own miniaturised world, filled with not only easter eggs, but the sweat and tears of creating something so ambitious for just one weekend.