Case Study · 02

Merchant.

A merchandising decision layer for Shopify. Extracted from a live luxury catalog, productized as an embedded app.

Sector

Commerce tooling.

Surface

Embedded Shopify app.

Stage

In pilot.

Origin

The Janus et Cie engagement.

Merchant product overview
The room

Merchandising at luxury scale is decision work. What to surface, what to pair, what to retire. On most teams that reasoning lives in one operator's head, and the systems around it record the outcome but never the reason.

Merchant started inside the Janus et Cie engagement as the layer that makes the reasoning legible: to the operator, to the customer, and to the next decision. It is now a standalone embedded app, in pilot on a live catalog.

The principle

Every recommendation arrives with its rationale. A recommendation without a reason reads as a sales push. A recommendation with one reads as help.

This is not copy polish. It is enforced at the schema level: no action ships without a reason attached. The operator sees why the agent moved a product. The customer sees why they are being shown one. The next decision inherits both.

The system

Three instruments, and the brain they all feed.

Why it exists

The pattern came out of operating, not speculation. A live luxury catalog needed assortment decisions made daily, at a scale where intuition stops being inspectable. Building the decision layer inside that engagement, against real catalog data, real trade constraints, real merchandising taste, is what made it a product instead of a demo.

That is the studio's working method. Solve it in production for one house. Extract the part that generalizes. Ship it as an instrument the next engagement can deploy.

Status

In pilot on a live luxury catalog. Deployable against any Shopify catalog with structured product data. The product surface is live at merchant.egc.nyc.

Where it came from · Case Study 01

Janus et Cie · the catalog it was extracted from →

Working with EGC

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.