Opening a Swiss Luxury Watch Store to China's 1.4 Billion Consumers

Client	IMHOF
Industry	Luxury watches, Swiss Made
Headquarters	Biel, Switzerland
Platform	WordPress + WooCommerce + Elementor
Key services	Audit, Migration, ICP filing, Analytics, China hosting, Maintenance

A Swiss Heritage Brand With a Chinese Audience Problem

IMHOF is a Swiss luxury watch brand headquartered in Biel, Switzerland. The brand traces its origins to La Chaux-de-Fonds, a town so deeply tied to watchmaking that UNESCO gave it World Heritage status. IMHOF’s Arthur Collection, a line of handcrafted timepieces with coloured dials and mechanical movements, is sold worldwide through their online store built on WordPress with WooCommerce and Elementor.

China is one of the world’s largest markets for Swiss luxury watches, accounting by some estimates for nearly a third of global luxury purchases. Chinese consumers don’t just buy watches. They research them online, compare them, and more and more often, they purchase them directly through brand websites. For IMHOF, reaching that audience with a working, high-quality online store was a business necessity, not a nice-to-have.

A Beautiful Website That Nobody in China Could Use

But the website, as it existed, was essentially broken for anyone trying to access it from mainland China. Web fonts were blocked. The payment system didn’t function. Google Analytics couldn’t connect. Even the contact form wouldn’t go through. For any website that’s a problem, but for a luxury brand selling timepieces that retail for thousands of dollars, where the buying experience needs to feel as considered as the product itself, it was untenable.

IMHOF came to us to fix all of it: migrate the full WordPress and WooCommerce store into China, sort out every broken dependency, and make sure Chinese buyers got the experience the brand actually intended.

Pulling the Stack Apart: The Technical Audit

We started with a full technical audit. The site was well-built: clean design, strong brand identity, polished product pages. But none of that mattered if the underlying infrastructure couldn’t serve Chinese users. So we went through the entire stack and documented every dependency that would fail behind the Great Firewall.

The issues touched almost every part of the site:

Issue	Impact
Web fonts loaded from blocked external servers	Text rendering broken across all pages
Google Analytics inaccessible from China	Zero visibility into Chinese visitor traffic
WooCommerce payment gateway incompatible	Chinese consumers unable to complete purchases
Contact form relying on blocked third-party service	No way for Chinese prospects to reach the brand

The Migration: Fixing Every Layer

After the audit we moved into the migration itself. We registered the domain for the Chinese market, handled the ICP filing, and got hosting up on servers inside mainland China. Then we started going through the technical fixes one at a time: replacing blocked fonts with locally hosted alternatives, swapping out Google Analytics for a China-compatible tracking tool, reconfiguring WooCommerce payments to actually work for Chinese buyers, and rebuilding the contact form so it could route through services that were accessible from the mainland.

For an e-commerce site selling luxury goods, the checkout experience isn’t just functional. It’s part of the brand.

We also ran a thorough content check across the whole site. Every product page, every image, every block of copy. For an e-commerce site with detailed product listings and a lot of lifestyle photography, you can’t just assume the migration carried everything over cleanly. That step took real attention.

Once everything was live, we set up analytics monitoring and put a maintenance and support contract in place to keep things running.

Service
Domain registration	Done
ICP filing	Done
WordPress technical audit	Done
Full site migration	Done
Content verification	Done
Analytics setup	Done
Ongoing maintenance and support	Done

The Outcome: A Luxury Experience That Finally Works in China

IMHOF’s online store is now fully accessible for consumers in mainland China, which is what this whole project was about. The site loads fast, payments go through, analytics are tracking properly, and the brand experience comes across the way it should. Chinese shoppers browsing the Arthur Collection today get the same polished presentation that buyers in Switzerland or anywhere else get.

For a Swiss watch brand where Chinese consumers represent one of the most important buyer groups, this migration was arguably the highest-priority digital project on the table.

“We had been struggling for months to get our WordPress site accessible in China. ChinaWebFoundry had us live on Chinese servers, ICP licensed, and indexed on Baidu within six weeks, faster than we ever thought possible.”

Fana K., CEO, IMHOF