- Client
- Maison Lipari
- Platform
- Shopify Plus
- Industry
- Luxury Homeware
- Scope
- Replatform + data migration
- Live site
- maisonlipari.ca
Maison Lipari is a Montreal institution: luxury beds, designer tableware, premium kitchenware and homeware from brands like Riedel, Le Creuset and Baobab. Their Magento 2 store had served them well, but the operational overhead — hosting, patching, extension maintenance — was engineering budget spent on keeping the lights on rather than selling.
In our replatforming engagement we moved the entire business to Shopify Plus: a rebuilt design language, and a complete migration of catalogue, customers and order history. It is the same playbook we now apply across our Shopify development practice.
The Challenge: Change Platforms Without Breaking a Luxury Brand
A luxury retailer cannot go dark, lose order history, or ship a storefront that feels cheaper than the old one. The migration had three non-negotiables:
- Complete data continuity — every product, customer account and historical order carried over
- A design upgrade, not a template swap — the new store had to feel more premium than the old one
- SEO preservation — years of category and product rankings mapped onto Shopify's URL structure with 301 redirects
Shopify enforces its own URL patterns (/products/, /collections/). You cannot keep Magento URLs — which is why a complete redirect map is the first artefact we build in any replatform, before a single template is touched.
What We Built
Catalogue and Customer Migration
Magento and Shopify model commerce differently — attribute sets become metafields, configurable products become variants, category trees become collections. We wrote migration tooling that translated the catalogue faithfully, then verified it SKU by SKU, so merchandising landed intact instead of flattened.
A Storefront Worthy of the Brands It Sells
We rebuilt the theme around photography and brand storytelling — brand-level collection pages for houses like Le Creuset, editorial landing sections, and product pages that read like a considered recommendation rather than a database row.
Retention Built In
The new stack wires the storefront into Klaviyo for lifecycle email — abandoned-cart flows, replenishment reminders and campaign segmentation driven by the migrated customer history. Retention data that took years to accumulate started working from day one on the new platform.
The Technology Stack
- Shopify Plus — hosted commerce; hosting, scaling and PCI compliance off the client's plate
- Customised premium theme — a heavily reworked theme layer, tailored to the brand rather than templated
- Klaviyo — lifecycle email on migrated customer data
- Migration tooling — scripted catalogue/customer/order transfer with SKU-level verification, plus a full 301 redirect map
The honest trade-off we discuss with every merchant weighing this move: Shopify Plus buys you operational calm at the price of Magento's raw flexibility. For a retailer whose edge is curation and service — not exotic checkout logic — that trade is usually right. When it isn't, we say so; our Magento practice exists for exactly those cases, and our platforms overview walks through how we make the call.
Thinking About Leaving Magento?
In our experience the replatforms that go wrong are the ones that start with a theme instead of a data map. If you're weighing Magento against Shopify Plus for a retail brand, talk to our engineering team — we've argued both sides for real clients and we'll tell you which one your business actually needs.