The marketplace aggregates 40 partner boutiques, each with its own identity and its own luxury customer base, but every one of them ran on the exact same rigid template. Distinct boutiques that should have looked nothing alike ended up looking interchangeable to a shopper moving between them, undermining the sense of individual craftsmanship each boutique was trying to sell.

The template's rigidity showed up operationally too. Merchandising changes for any one boutique had to queue behind a single shared release cycle, so a boutique with a time-sensitive update waited on the same schedule as everyone else. And because the platform's front end was tightly coupled to the underlying system, even a small copy change needed a developer to ship it, not the boutique team that actually owned the content.

Performance made the experience worse still. Luxury goods sell on image quality, so product pages were heavy with photography, and on the old template those pages loaded slowly on mobile, exactly where a growing share of luxury shoppers were browsing. Every one of these problems traced back to the same rigid, coupled template underneath all 40 boutiques.

We replatformed the marketplace onto a headless architecture built around a shared commerce core, exposing catalogue, cart and checkout as APIs rather than a monolithic front end. That core stayed common across all 40 boutiques, so the platform team maintains one system instead of forty variations of the same rigid template.

On top of that core we built a component-based storefront layer, so each boutique can express its own typography, layouts and editorial content through a headless CMS, without touching the shared commerce logic underneath. Boutique teams now publish content directly and see it live without waiting on an engineering deployment for every change.

Server-side rendering and edge caching then targeted the performance problem directly, optimising the image-heavy product pages that luxury shopping depends on across every boutique on the marketplace. Together, the shared core, the component storefronts and the rendering layer meant every boutique could move fast without ever touching what the others depended on.