Chronext is the global destination for over 7,000 luxury watch models, from renowned brands like Rolex, Hublot, to Audemars Piguet. As a marketplace for new, vintage, and certified pre-owned high-end watches, Chronext needs to ensure the product images accurately reflect the product descriptions and align with its luxury status. Emanuel Schleussinger, CTO of Chronext, places a heavy focus on delivering a cohesive and trustworthy shopping experience across Chronext’s website and iOS app.

"Selling luxury watches on the internet is not an easy task. When a customer has a shopping cart valued over €10,000, we have to win their trust and make sure we present the high-quality photos that show accurate details."

- Emanuel Schleussinger, CTO of Chronext

Before working with imgix, Chronext faced significant challenges with image processing. Removing and replacing the background of product photos, which is essential for luxury e-commerce, was a tedious process. The internal photography and design team spent considerable time on cropping and photo editing, straining resources and slowing down operations.

With 70% of its traffic coming from mobile, Chronext was also concerned with balancing image quality and loading speed. It needed the images to have high enough resolution for customers to zoom in and see the intricate details, while keeping the file sizes small enough to load quickly. Finally, the team wanted to avoid solutions with complicated and unpredictable pricing.

"We want to work with a company that’s honest and cares about engineers. We don’t want unproven solutions or an image CDN that’s the side project of a huge enterprise. Having looked into a few other image CDNs, some of their pricing structures are complicated and hard to predict. We want fair pricing and strong value for our investment."

- Emanuel Schleussinger, CTO of Chronext

To create a cohesive product gallery, each image needs to be uniformly centered, cropped, and set on a white background. As one of the first customers to use imgix’s background removal and replacement feature, Emanuel conducted extensive testing and now applies it across almost all product photos. In addition to background removal, the team also used the following parameters in the imgix rendering API:

• auto=format,compress applies best-effort compression and image-format conversion. With auto=format, images will be served in the AVIF format whenever possible.
• trim=color removes the extra space around each watch.
• fit=fill then adds an equal amount of space to the left and right of the watch, with the same color defined in the background color parameter, resulting in a square image defined by ar=1:1.

imgix's seamless integration with Chronext's web tech stack, which includes Commercetools, Frontastic, and React, added to the efficiency of operations.

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Chronext found its perfect fit with imgix, a platform that delivers robust image transformation, proactive problem-solving, and fair pricing.

With imgix, Chronext is able to simplify its workload drastically and enhance the visual experience. Not only does imgix automate the tedious background removal process, but it also reduces Chronext’s average image response time to just 57 milliseconds. Image file sizes decreased by 80% on average with auto=format,compress without impacting the quality, further optimizing loading speeds and performance.

By offloading image processing and focusing on its core workloads, the Chronext team delivers on its commitment to both its buyers and sellers, reinforcing its reputation as a trusted marketplace for high-end watches.

"imgix ticks all the boxes in what we expect from a great image CDN. The team and our Account Manager are receptive to feedback, listened and solved our problems, and are truly supportive partners to us."

- Emanuel Schleussinger, CTO of Chronext