Janus et Cie.

Janus et Cie is a B2B luxury furniture house with a global trade-only catalog. The engagement: replace a legacy storefront with a Hydrogen-based site that handles thousands of variant configurations 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.

EGC architected and built across three layers, with each layer cleanly bounded from the next.

The storefront on Hydrogen. The embedded admin as a custom Shopify app, owned by the merchandising team. The merchandising substrate as a decision layer the front end queries — productized in parallel as Merchant, deployable beyond this engagement.

The boundary discipline matters as much as the build. The catalog can change without touching the storefront. The decision layer can be retrained without touching the catalog. The team that runs the catalog does not need to wait on engineering to do their work.

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.