Bottega Veneta Teams with China Pro Consulting to Launch to China
Bottega Veneta Overcomes Technical and Legal Challenges to Launch in China
China is on track to surpass America as the World’s largest luxury market by 2025. At which time experts predict Chinese consumers will account for half of all luxury goods spending worldwide.
So it makes sense that luxury brands like Bottega Veneta focus on increasing their reach by increasing their Chinese market.
About Bottega Veneta
Bottega Veneta is one of the World’s most recognized luxury brands based in Milan, Italy. They have established themselves as a premier luxury fashion brand, celebrated for their extraordinary handbags, fashion, and leather goods.
In 2011, Bottega Veneta announced its first Chinese website to increase its brand awareness across all of China. Today, Bottega Veneta operates over 40 stores and joins well-known brands such as Gucci and Louis Vuitton as top-tier luxury brands in China.
The Challenge: Making Bottega Veneta's websites work in China
In early 2021, Bottega Veneta announced that it shut down nearly all of its social media platforms. The change meant that Bottega Veneta would rely more heavily on its web content to stay relevant in its consumers’ lives.
As Bottega Veneta modernized its global websites for increased performance, it learned that many of these new sites were inaccessible to consumers in China.
For this case study, we’ll look at two content-rich websites and the challenges in getting them working in China.
Issued by Bottega Online Magazine didn't work in China
In 2021, after dropping nearly all their social media accounts, Bottega Veneta announced to the World that they would be delivering a new media experience in the form of a luxury fashion digital magazine.
Once they had picked a Jamstack approach, it was time to select their tooling. Netlify was chosen as the hosting platform for the global site. Sanity’s headless CMS was selected to manage the site’s global content. All images and video content had to be hosted on Sanity’s foreign (non-Chinese) content delivery networks (CDN) to maintain an agile workflow.
Tristan Bottega’s Project Manager painfully discovered that their technical stack would not work in China. He also learned that many other well-known overseas web development technologies solutions are not usable or wholly blocked in China.
ICP filing red tape and a tight deadline
Not long before the digital magazine’s global launch date, Tristan learned that they would not have an ICP license in time, putting the team in a difficult situation. Without the ICP, the website could not be hosted in mainland China, forcing Bottega Veneta to deploy the Chinese website with Netlify.
Across China, consumers attempting to view the anticipated digital experience found the website to be inaccessible due to:
Netlify’s overseas servers were responding slowly in China.
Sanity CMS’s foreign (non-Chinese) CDNs were still trying to load content.
Bottega Veneta’s Seasonal Collections Site didn't work in China
It is common for luxury fashion brands to display their seasonal fashion lineup through live fashion shows and seasonal collection websites.
Alessandro was a Project Manager tasked with developing a new website for Bottega Veneta to share seasonal collections with the World. Bottega Veneta’s site architecture used Next.js and Sanity and was hosted via Vercel.
We are currently looking at how to deliver images from Sanity’s CDN to China
One of Alessandro's American colleagues had just overcome a similar issue with another client's new site deployed to China. He told Alessandro that he’d received guidance from China Pro's Architects.
Marketing analytics were compromised
In addition to the website’s architectural issue, Bottega Veneta quickly learned that Google Analytics didn’t work correctly in China. Their marketing teams had observed a data loss issue from Google Analytics, leading to misleading or incomplete information.
Bottega Veneta’s marketing team needed a fix to the 3rd-party client-side analytics systems to ensure their data was reliable and painted the complete picture.
The Solution: Bottega Veneta uses China Pro to develop custom solution for China
In searching for a solution to get the Bottega Veneta websites working in China, their team discovered the experts at China Pro Consulting.
After several conversations with Alessandro and Tristan, China Pro provided Bottega Veneta with a custom technical solution. Bottega’s custom solution allowed their developers to keep the same architecture but with technologies that worked in China.
China ProTechnical Architecture Review: China Pro reviewed Bottega Veneta’s website architecture and technologies. For several web technologies that didn’t work in China, China Pro provided alternative solutions allowing websites to maintain their agile architecture.
Legal Review: China Pro helped Bottega Veneta to address the problems and concerns when they completed the ICP Filing and enabled the website to be publicly accessible in China in compliance with laws and regulations.
Custom Road Map to China: China Pro consulted with Bottega Veneta to develop a custom Road Map. Allowing the Bottega Veneta team to launch their web projects on time and confidently in China.
Results: Seamless Migration into China
Maintain Agile Workflow and Deliver Performance across China
Using the China Pro recommended solutions, Bottega Veneta successfully launched several legal and content-rich websites to China from Italy. Allowing Bottega Veneta's content team to connect with Chinese consumers' daily lives.
Page load times have improved by over 10x times without the additional high cost of third-party content delivery networks (CDN). The China-friendly architecture allowed the team to:
Deliver a blazing-fast website and content to consumers across China
Maintain an agile workflow: enabling Bottega Veneta’s content team to publish quarterly issues Issued by Bottega to China from Italy
Simplify Bottega Veneta’s content workflow by enabling Sanity headless CMS to simultaneously serve worldwide and Chinese websites.
Stay compliant with all of China’s Cybersecurity rules and regulations
The most valuable result from working with China Pro Consulting is that our small team can now focus on our content and message rather than worrying about technology working in China.
Focus Delivering Rich Content, not Worrying about China
China Pro Consulting has helped Bottega Veneta reach millions of Chinese consumers directly. In the digital magazine and seasonal website’s first few months, the websites recorded a massive number of unique visitors per day without issue.
Benefiting from its website’s new legal and China-friendly site architecture, Bottega Veneta can now better focus on connecting with Chinese consumers through world-class content.
Have questions about migrating your company's website to China? Please contact us. Our Chinese technical architects are available to assist you.
