Case Study
Shopify Plus, Shopify Functions, and Managed Markets — with Co-Curator
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary art in the United States. Its retail arm, SFMOMA Museum Store, runs a flagship store, exhibition shops throughout the museum, and an online store on Shopify Plus. On a typical day, the online store takes about 25 orders.
On October 3, 2026, SFMOMA opened RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me, the first museum exhibition drawn from the personal collection of RM, the leader of BTS. Nearly 180 works, one US venue, and a fan base that spans every continent. The store's exclusive merchandise line, built around RM's own handwriting, had to be sold online, worldwide, without overselling, and without the headcount of a global retailer — and the planning call was six days before pre-orders had to be live.
Sold $1.47M across 8,900 orders in two presale days — more than the store's total online sales over the previous twelve months.
Opened five new markets with Shopify Markets and Managed Markets, growing international orders 9.4x between the first drop and the second.
$854K in a single day with no downtime, while a Shopify Functions checkout rule enforced a two-per-product limit across 19,000+ pre-ordered items.
SFMOMA Museum Store is a small team: $948K online over the prior twelve months, best month ever $215K. The store had never sold internationally — checkout was US-only, with no duties, local currencies, or cross-border shipping configured. The legacy theme had no pre-order capability. Online sales couldn't touch in-store inventory, resellers were a certainty, and there was no fulfillment partner to pack tens of thousands of parcels.
The planning call was September 25. Pre-orders had to be live by September 28. The drop was October 1 at noon.
Co-Curator and SFMOMA shipped pre-orders on the existing theme in three days. Each RM product got a web-only SKU set to continue selling when out of stock, so online demand never drew down the exhibition shop. A ship-date metafield drives an "Estimated to ship" notice, switches add-to-cart to "Pre-Order," and stamps the expected date onto every line item through checkout, confirmation, and the admin. Member pricing carried through unchanged.
On the morning of the drop, the third-party quantity-limit app failed testing — and theme-level caps don't stop express checkouts, abandoned-cart emails, or bots. Co-Curator wrote a Cart and Checkout Validation function in Shopify Functions and shipped it from Museum OS. It caps any tagged product at two units per order across variants, blocks store pickup on pre-orders, and reads its limits from app metafields so SFMOMA can change them without a deploy. It was live 30 minutes before noon.
"Functions let us put the rule where it actually has to live, in checkout itself. We wrote it, deployed it, and turned it on in under an hour. That is not something we could have done on any other platform on launch morning."
— Bradley Platz, founder, Co-Curator
The first drop did $40,000 in minutes and closed the day at 2,960 orders and $473K on 96,594 sessions; SFMOMA deliberately paused at ~3,000 orders so fulfillment could catch up. Over six days the store signed an LA 3PL the same afternoon the contract arrived, wired it in as a dedicated Shopify location with Flow tagging every pre-order for split fulfillment, and built the international markets in Shopify Markets using Sidekick — an APAC market with local currencies, plus Canada, the UK, Mexico, and an EU group — with Managed Markets handling duties and import taxes as merchant of record.
Pre-orders reopened worldwide on October 8: 5,053 orders and $854K that day, at a 4.9% conversion rate, up from 2.9% on the first drop.
In two pre-order releases, SFMOMA Museum Store took 8,912 orders and $1.47M — against 9,297 orders and $948K over the previous twelve months combined. October 8 alone was four times the store's best month on record, and by the end of the first week the store had passed its online revenue goal for the entire fiscal year. International orders grew from 102 to 957 between drops — Japan went from 2 orders to 241, South Korea from zero to 80 — and the collection reached customers in 53 countries. Customers pre-ordered 19,268 items, the checkout rule held the line at two per product throughout, and Shopify held through both surges with no downtime. A team that had never shipped outside the US is now fulfilling into Asia and Europe through a 3PL it had not contracted ten days earlier.
"Museums put on blockbuster shows, and the store often has limited time to be ready for it. Shopify is the platform where that is a reasonable ask. Functions, Markets, Flow, and Plus checkout are the same tools we will use for the next exhibition, and the one after that."
— Bradley Platz, founder, Co-Curator
Pre-orders, checkout rules, international markets, split fulfillment — we'll walk you through how SFMOMA did it and what it would look like on your store.
