Janus et Cie.
A B2B luxury catalog, end-to-end on Hydrogen. Storefront, embedded admin, and a merchandising decision substrate underneath.
B2B luxury furniture.
2,200 masters · 7,600 variants.
Hydrogen on Shopify Plus.
May 2026.
Janus et Cie is a B2B luxury furniture house with a global trade-only catalog. The engagement: replace a legacy storefront with a Hydrogen platform that carries roughly 19,600 legacy SKUs' worth of configuration without losing the editorial register the brand is known for.
The work spans three layers. A storefront customers browse. An embedded admin the merchandising team operates. A decision substrate that ranks assortment from catalog signals.
A B2B catalog at luxury scale fights several constraints at once. Trade pricing rules per account. Product configurations that branch by finish, fabric, and dimension. Imagery that has to read as editorial photography, not catalog. A merchandising team that needs the surface to behave in production, not in spec.
Off-the-shelf Shopify falls short in the same places every luxury B2B catalog does. The configurator. The catalog governance. The decision layer that decides what to surface. Each gap demands a custom layer.
Three layers, each cleanly bounded from the next. Emerson architected and led the build inside Janus. EGC built the embedded admin and the decision substrate.
Embedded admin
React · Polaris · Postgres · job queue
Owns master and variant data, approvals, and the audit trail. Feeds the ERP one way. The merchandising team runs it without engineering.
Hydrogen storefront
Shopify Plus · trade pricing · configurator · editorial imagery
Roughly 1,400 live product pages. Reads the catalog. Never authors it.
Merchant
Agents · re-rank · decisions log
Ranks assortment from catalog and demand signals. Every recommendation carries its rationale. Productized in parallel as a standalone app.
- 01Master and variant, not per-SKUThe legacy catalog carried roughly 19,600 released SKUs as flat records. The rebuild models about 2,200 product masters carrying 7,600 variants. Configuration rules, pricing, and imagery attach once per master and inherit down.
- 02Governance outside the storefrontCatalog operations live in an embedded admin the merchandising team runs. The storefront reads. A catalog change never requires a deploy, and a deploy never blocks the catalog.
- 03One source of truth for imagery15,000+ assets carry structured metadata in the DAM. Crops and renditions are computed at request time, not stored. One asset, every surface.
- 04One-way flow to the ERPProduct data moves from the catalog to the ERP, never back. The ERP consumes; it does not author. No two-master reconciliation problem, ever.
- 05Migration mapped against search dataLegacy URLs were mapped against live search-console data before cutover. The redirect map preserved roughly 78% of tracked organic click volume through the platform switch.
- 01Hydrogen storefront with the full B2B catalog, trade-account pricing, and product configurator. Roughly 1,400 live product pages.
- 02Embedded Shopify admin for catalog governance: master data, variant architecture, audit trail.
- 03Merchant, the merchandising decision substrate, ranking assortment from catalog signals.
- 04Editorial imagery pipeline through a single source of truth. 15,000+ assets under structured metadata.
- 05Live in production, May 2026.
Catalog operations the merchandising team controls without engineering intervention. A storefront that scales with the catalog instead of slowing under it. A substrate that other engagements can deploy against, productized in parallel as Merchant.
The most useful outcome is not a metric. It is a boundary. The team that owns the catalog owns the surface. Engineering ships infrastructure, not catalog edits.
Merchant · the decision layer, extracted →
A studio that ships and runs.
The studio takes one or two new engagements per quarter. If the work fits, an introduction from someone EGC has worked with starts the conversation.