Headless Commerce

April 07, 2026

How Maisonette Built a Multi-Vendor Childrenswear Marketplace on Spree Commerce

Case StudyHeadless Commercemarketplacenext.jsopen source

Maisonette runs a curated childrenswear multi-vendor marketplace with 65,000+ products from hundreds of independent brands on Spree Commerce and Next.js. What once required millions in platform licensing, a custom-built storefront, and large engineering teams is now accessible to any team with Spree Commerce 5.4 and its free open-source Next.js storefront.

Key Takeaways

Last verified: April 2026

The deployment: Maisonette operates 65,000+ products from hundreds of brands on a Spree Commerce backend with a Next.js storefront.

The shift: When Maisonette launched in 2018, building a multi-vendor marketplace required separate vendor orchestration software costing six figures annually and a custom-built Next.js storefront. Today, Spree Commerce 5.4 ships native marketplace functionality out of the box, and the Next.js storefront is available for free to anyone.

Why it matters: The same architecture that powers a $15M-funded childrenswear marketplace is now available to teams going live in weeks, not months, with a fraction of the upfront investment.

Maisonette: From Curated Startup to Scaled Marketplace

In 2017, Sylvana Durrett and Luisana Rocchia set out to build something that did not exist: a single destination where parents could discover premium children’s clothing, toys, nursery furniture, and home decor from hundreds of independent brands. Not a generic drop-shipping operation. A curated marketplace where every brand was handpicked and every product met a quality bar.

By 2018, Maisonette was live. The marketplace grew quickly, expanding into new product categories and attracting institutional attention. In 2019, Business of Fashion reported a $15 million investment that helped fuel international shipping and deeper brand partnerships. Investors writing checks that large do not gamble on shaky technology. They back systems that can scale.

Today, Maisonette’s catalog has grown to over 65,000 products across hundreds of vendors. The platform runs on Spree Commerce as its backend commerce engine with a Next.js frontend delivering the storefront experience. It is one of the clearest real-world examples of open-source commerce powering a funded, production-scale marketplace.

The story matters beyond Maisonette itself. When this marketplace was built in 2017 and 2018, assembling a multi-vendor operation at this scale required expensive third-party software, custom integrations, and a large engineering team. You needed a commerce engine, a separate marketplace orchestration platform, a custom-built frontend, and engineers who could wire everything together. The total bill for a comparable stack easily reached seven figures before the first product page went live.

The pieces that Maisonette had to stitch together from separate vendors and custom code now ship as native features in Spree Commerce 5.4. That changes the math for every marketplace builder who comes next.

How Does Maisonette’s Architecture Work?

Picture a parent browsing Maisonette, adding a cotton dress from one brand, a wooden toy from another, and a crib sheet from a third to a single cart. Behind that seamless checkout, three distinct layers handle separate jobs.

The frontend is built on Next.js, a React-based framework that handles server-side rendering for fast page loads and search engine visibility. Every product page, category listing, and checkout flow runs through this layer. The Store API serves structured product data as JSON, keeping the commerce logic completely decoupled from how the storefront looks and behaves.

The commerce engine is Spree Commerce. It manages the product catalog, variant configuration, pricing, inventory tracking, order processing, and payment handling. Think of it as the operational brain: every product, price, and order state lives here. When a vendor updates a price or a shipment goes out, the commerce engine processes it and the frontend reflects the change on the next page load.

The marketplace layer originally used Mirakl for vendor management and multi-seller orchestration. In 2018, marketplace-grade vendor onboarding, catalog aggregation, and commission management required a dedicated platform like Mirakl. That is no longer the case. Spree Commerce 5.4 ships these capabilities natively, which means new marketplace builders can skip the separate platform entirely.

Layer	Maisonette’s Stack (2018)	What Spree Commerce 5.4 Delivers Today
Frontend	Next.js (custom build)	Official Next.js storefront starter (Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript 5)
Commerce Engine	Spree Commerce	Spree Commerce 5.4 with expanded marketplace features
Marketplace	Mirakl (separate vendor, six-figure annual contract + GMV cut)	Native marketplace module with vendor onboarding, dashboards, commission management
Vendor Sync	Mirakl integration + custom development	Automated brand onboarding from existing vendor stores + two-way product/inventory/order sync
Payment Splitting	Custom implementation	Stripe Connect or Adyen for Platforms with automated vendor payouts

When Maisonette was built, Spree Commerce did not yet ship a native marketplace module. Teams building multi-vendor marketplaces needed a separate orchestration layer like Mirakl. Mirakl’s base subscription typically runs between EUR 180,000 and EUR 325,000 per year, with a GMV-based component that grows as marketplace revenue increases. On top of the subscription, integrating a separate orchestration platform with the commerce engine required significant custom development and specialized backend engineers.

That constraint no longer exists. The marketplace capabilities that cost Maisonette a separate platform subscription and months of integration work now ship as part of the commerce engine itself.

What Does Spree Commerce 5.4 Change for Marketplace Builders?

Spree Commerce 5.4 ships native multi-vendor marketplace functionality that covers the capabilities Maisonette originally needed a separate platform to provide. The difference in cost, complexity, and time-to-market is significant.

Vendor onboarding and management. The marketplace module handles the entire vendor lifecycle from a single admin. Vendors apply, get approved, and manage their own catalogs and orders from a self-service dashboard. You set commission rules once and the system handles the rest. No separate platform, no six-figure contract.

Automated brand sync. For vendors already selling through their own stores, Spree Commerce supports bi-directional sync for products, inventory, orders, and shipments. Picture a children’s clothing brand that already sells through their own online store. They connect to your marketplace, and their products appear automatically. Inventory counts stay synchronized. Orders flow back to their existing systems without any change to how they already operate.

Marketplace payment splitting. Stripe Connect and Adyen for Platforms handle automated commission calculation and vendor payouts. A parent buys a dress from one brand, a toy from another, and a nursery lamp from a third. The payment infrastructure splits that single order across all three vendors, takes the marketplace commission, and deposits each vendor’s share automatically. No custom payment integration required.

Composable architecture. This is the part that matters most for long-term maintainability. Every layer of the stack is swappable: payment providers, search engines, frontend frameworks. Your marketplace is not locked into any single vendor for any part of the system, and evolving one layer never forces a rewrite of another.

Three years from now, when your search requirements outgrow your initial setup, you swap the search engine without touching the checkout flow or the vendor dashboard. That independence is what keeps marketplace operations manageable as they grow.

Why Does the Next.js Frontend Matter?

Maisonette’s use of Next.js is not just a technology choice. It validates a production architecture pattern that any marketplace team can now replicate without starting from scratch. When tens of thousands of product pages need to load quickly and rank well in search engines, the frontend framework matters as much as the commerce engine behind it.

The Store API handles the conversation between the storefront and the commerce engine. The storefront asks for product data, pricing, cart contents, and checkout flows. The API delivers it. The two systems run independently, which means the team working on how the site looks never blocks the team working on how orders process. Updates ship faster because neither side waits for the other.

For teams building today, Spree Commerce ships an open-source Next.js eCommerce storefront built on Next.js 16, React 19, and TypeScript 5 with the official @spree/sdk. TypeScript types are generated from Spree’s OpenAPI 3.0 specification, so your frontend code knows the exact shape of every API response before you write a single line.

For a marketplace with 65,000+ product pages, server-side rendering is not optional. Search engines need to crawl and index every product page effectively. Shoppers need pages that load fast on mobile. And the frontend needs to handle dynamic inventory and pricing data without sacrificing page speed. The combination of Next.js handling the rendering and Spree Commerce delivering the data through a clean API achieves all three.

Maisonette built their Next.js integration from scratch because this starter did not exist in 2018. You do not need to do that. Fork the storefront, customize the design, and deploy. You skip months of foundational frontend work that Maisonette’s team had to absorb as part of their initial build.

65,000 Products and Hundreds of Vendors at Scale

Running a curated marketplace at Maisonette’s scale is a fundamentally different engineering challenge from running a single-brand store.

Consider the operational reality. Hundreds of vendor catalogs need to stay synchronized in real time. When a brand updates a product description or changes a price, that change needs to flow through to the marketplace storefront without manual intervention.

Inventory accuracy is existential for marketplaces. When a shopper buys a sold-out item because inventory counts were stale, you lose both the sale and the customer’s trust. Counts update as orders flow through, preventing the overselling problem that destroys credibility in multi-vendor environments.

Commission calculations run on every transaction, splitting revenue between the marketplace and the vendor automatically. The storefront renders tens of thousands of product pages, each one needing accurate pricing, stock status, and vendor information. Payment processing handles splitting across every order involving multiple sellers.

Maisonette’s $15 million investment round confirmed that institutional investors were comfortable backing this architecture at scale. The commerce engine had to meet technical due diligence standards set by investors who understand the difference between a single-brand checkout and a multi-vendor marketplace processing thousands of transactions across hundreds of independent sellers. When that level of capital goes into a company, the technology stack is not an afterthought. It is part of what the investors are buying into.

As described in Spree Commerce’s published case documentation, Maisonette set out to create a one-stop shopping solution for parents, and the platform has grown from launch to managing those 65,000+ products across a global vendor network. The combination of Spree Commerce and Next.js has supported that growth from day one.

Build Your Own Marketplace on Spree Commerce

The architecture that powers Maisonette is no longer a multi-million-dollar build. Spree Commerce 5.4 ships the pieces that Maisonette had to assemble from separate vendors and custom code. And you can start for free.

Start with Community Edition. The open-source marketplace platform includes the marketplace starter: vendors sign up, manage their products from a self-service dashboard, orders split across vendors at checkout, and you earn commissions from day one. The product catalog, pricing engine, inventory management, and order processing all come built in. No licensing cost.

Add the storefront. The open-source Next.js eCommerce storefront gives you a production-ready frontend. Fork it, customize the design to match your brand, and deploy. You skip the months of foundational work that Maisonette’s team absorbed when building from scratch in 2018.

Scale with Enterprise Edition. When your marketplace grows and vendors need automated integrations, Enterprise Edition adds the automation layer. Vendors connect their existing stores and everything syncs automatically: products, inventory, orders, shipments. Stripe Connect or Adyen for Platforms handles automated commission calculation and vendor payouts. The path from launch to scale is configuration, not a rewrite.

A small, agile team can go live with a fully functional multi-vendor marketplace in weeks. Not the months or years it took to replicate Maisonette’s original build from 2018. The upfront investment drops from seven figures to a fraction of that. And the composable architecture means every layer can be swapped independently as your business evolves.

Maisonette built their marketplace from scratch because the tools did not exist yet. You do not need to do that. Spree Commerce 5.4 ships the commerce engine, the marketplace module, and the Next.js storefront as ready-to-deploy open-source software. The expensive middleware, the custom frontend, and the six-figure vendor orchestration platform are no longer required.

Ready to build? Fork the Next.js storefront to start building today, or talk to our team to explore how Enterprise Edition can power your marketplace at scale.

Get Started with Spree Commerce 5.4

Spree Commerce 5.4 ships a production-ready Next.js storefront, a TypeScript SDK, and a one-command installer. Everything Maisonette assembled from scratch in 2018 now comes ready to deploy out of the box.

What changed with 5.4 for marketplace builders:

• One-command install via npx create-spree-app scaffolds a full Spree backend + Next.js storefront in minutes.
• TypeScript SDK (@spree/sdk) with autocomplete replaces manual API calls with typed, safe integrations.
• Next.js eCommerce storefront ships with React-rendered transactional emails, native MeiliSearch search, dynamic breadcrumbs, multi-sitemap, robots.txt, privacy/consent, mobile-responsive design, and color swatch filters.
• AI-assisted development with AGENTS.md and an MCP server means Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot understand the Spree codebase from day one.
• Multi-language and multi-region URL routing built into the storefront for cross-border eCommerce from launch.
• Live demo at demo.spreecommerce.org shows the production storefront running against a real Spree backend.

Fork the Next.js eCommerce storefront on GitHub and run npx create-spree-app to scaffold a full store in minutes. Next.js storefront install guide (deploy on Vercel). Ready for enterprise? Get started with Spree Commerce.

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