For Balmain Hair Couture, the luxury hair brand linked to Maison Balmain Paris, we moved the entire e-commerce operation from Magento to Shopify Plus. What began as a migration grew into a multi-year partnership in which we shape the digital roadmap together.
Magento had carried the brand for years, but every market had picked up its own modifications along the way. Maintenance, updates and security ended up demanding more attention than the store itself. Branding, platform, product data and the go-to-market of new labels now sit under one roof.
A multi-storefront strategy on Shopify Plus: every market gets its own storefront with its own language, currency and assortment, all driven by one custom-built theme. The B2B route for salons runs alongside the D2C route for consumers.
Orders, customer data and content moved across from Magento with their history intact. An improvement built once lands in every storefront after a single release. The brand feeling never drifts apart from one market to the next.
One custom-built theme carries every storefront, with the PIM system as the single source of truth. Product information, variants, localizations and imagery are managed centrally and rolled out to every market automatically.
New functionality is built once and goes live across the entire network in a single release. That cuts maintenance, keeps the brand experience identical in every market and turns a new label into something other than a months-long project. Eau de 1974 was the first sub-brand we took from branding to live storefront this way.
From Magento to Shopify Plus
For years Magento gave Balmain Hair what a luxury brand needed: full control and endless room for custom work. That freedom had a flip side. Every market had drifted away from the standard over time, every extension asked for its own release and every security patch for a round of testing across all installations. The platform became a project in its own right, while the brand was looking for room to sell.
Shopify Plus reverses that balance. Hosting, scalability, PCI compliance and the checkout sit with the platform, so the team's attention can go to the brand. We ran the migration with the history intact: products and variants, customer accounts, order history, content and the existing URL structure with a complete redirect plan, so years of hard-won organic positions moved across too.
Instead of one site doing everything at once, Balmain Hair got a multi-storefront setup: a dedicated storefront per market and per part of the brand under a single Shopify Plus licence, each with its own language, currency, assortment, pricing and tax rules. Salons and distribution partners follow their own B2B route with company accounts and price lists, while consumers see the D2C store. Every audience gets the store that fits it, without a second brand appearing.
What holds those storefronts together is the custom theme. Every store runs on the same codebase; only the settings, the sections and the translations differ per market. A campaign section, an improved product page or a change to the checkout experience is designed once, built once and tested once, and is then live everywhere. The alternative, a separate theme per country, is exactly the pattern the brand wanted to leave behind on Magento.
The gain sits in maintenance and in pace. One codebase means one place for updates, one set of tests and one moment of release, and the wider API limits of Shopify Plus keep the store standing during the moments that earn the most. Opening a new market is no longer a migration but a storefront on a foundation that already exists, with the brand experience built in.
