Maison Kameur, a custom ecommerce store.

Maison Kameur’s founders already knew online retail, having run a store on Shopify. Their new project set different requirements. Maison Kameur presents several artisans under one banner, each with their own story, objects and parcels, while Shopify thinks of a store as a single seller. Reproducing that model would have meant stacking paid apps around a theme, with a subscription and transaction fees, on a platform the store would never have owned.

So we built a custom store, starting from its model rather than from the constraints of an existing platform.

The site relies on two open source tools, each in its own role. Medusa, an ecommerce engine, handles the catalog, pricing, inventory, carts and orders. Payload, a CMS built into the site, handles the artisan profiles and the journal. Each product references its artisan, without any data being copied from one tool to the other. An object’s page leads to the story of the person who made it, and an artisan’s page always shows up-to-date objects, with no double entry for the founders.

We built twelve integrations for this store.

For invoices, we started from an existing open source plugin and adapted it to French law and to the store’s situation. The founders enter their own legal details from the admin, and the invoice changes structure with the company’s legal status. It carries the VAT exemption notice for as long as the store is a micro-enterprise, then breaks out VAT the day the store becomes liable for it, with no technical work involved.

Search runs on Orama, an open source engine, following an approach inspired by Mercur.js, a marketplace platform built on Medusa. Visitors find an object or an artisan just as easily, and the engine stays swappable if the store’s needs change.

An online store has to reconcile two opposing demands. A fast catalog means keeping pages cached, while accurate stock means rereading the data at every moment. We decided data by data. Object names, prices and photos are served from the cache and only refreshed when they change. Availability shown in listings has its own cache, so a sale refreshes only that, without slowing down the rest of the catalog. On an object’s page, stock is reread on every view, then checked twice at payment, and neither the cart nor the customer account ever goes through the cache.

This level of control isn’t available on a platform like Shopify, where caching stays in the vendor’s hands. Background tasks, such as sending emails or updating search, also run in a separate process, so they never slow down customers’ browsing.

The founders wanted to understand how visitors move through the store without putting their customers’ trust at risk. Analytics run on PostHog, hosted in Europe, and only become complete with the visitor’s consent. Without consent, they stay anonymous and set no cookies. With consent, they allow journey analysis, but session recording stays off on the checkout, payment and account pages. The founders edit the consent banner text from the admin, and every visitor’s choice is kept as proof.

Sales figures, for their part, are read directly from Medusa and never mix with browsing data, so the sales dashboard stays accurate whatever the consent rate.

We also designed the store’s visual identity, in a neo-brutalist direction. The site owns its visible construction, with hard borders, sharp unblurred shadows, bold tight typography and photos shown without artifice, on matte paper backgrounds that recall a printed workshop catalog. This stance suits handmade objects, whose directness it shares. Anything purely decorative was left out, so every element on screen carries real information and the objects stay in the foreground. The system fits in seven colors and runs through the entire journey, down to emails and checkout.