Reduction in image file size

Image response time

Monthly image requests

Emanuel Schleussinger, CTO of Chronext

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.

Chronext, a global luxury watch marketplace, struggled with time-consuming background removal and replacement tasks, as well as finding a balance between image quality and loading speed. By implementing imgix, Chronext streamlined its image processing workflow, automated background removal, and reduced image response time by 80% while maintaining image quality. This partnership allowed Chronext to enhance the visual experience for customers and reinforce its reputation as a trusted platform for high-end watches.

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.

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.

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

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, Emanualle 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.

imgix is the premier platform for images. imgix manages, optimizes, and delivers images and videos for faster pages, better visual quality, and a simpler workflow. Trusted by the world’s leading brands, such as Google, Netflix, Unsplash, and Nikkei, imgix helps businesses improve cost efficiency and accelerate growth.