Elevating The Hour Glass’s Digital Presence Across 8 Markets in APAC
The Hour Glass
Discover how The Hour Glass elevated its digital presence across 8 APAC markets, redesigning the website to enhance customer experience and drive engagement.
About the Client: The Hour Glass
Founded in 1979, The Hour Glass is a Singapore-listed, prestigious watch retailer that has become a powerhouse in APAC’s high-end watch market.
Headquartered in Singapore, the group operates over 65 boutiques in 14 cities — including flagship stores in Singapore’s famous Orchard Road, Hong Kong, Tokyo’s Ginza, Sydney, and Bangkok — and is an official retailer for top Swiss brands like Patek Philippe, Hublot, Cartier, and more.
With iconic brand partners, steady growth, and a distinct retail philosophy, The Hour Glass is a benchmark in high-end retail across Asia-Pacific.
To further elevate its digital retail experience and strengthen its presence across Asia-Pacific, The Hour Glass collaborated with IT Consultis (ITC) as a trusted digital transformation partner.
Goal & Objectives
Recognizing the need to adapt to evolving customer expectations, The Hour Glass aims to transform its website into a high-performing, future-ready platform — one that would reinforce its brand prestige and drive meaningful offline engagement across key Asia-Pacific markets.
At the heart of this transformation was the ambition to elevate the brand’s digital presence, advance its mission of “Advancing Watch Culture,” and drive foot traffic to boutiques across 8 global markets — Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.
To support this vision, together, we defined four strategic objectives:
- Create a seamless user journey: Deliver a fast, intuitive browsing experience that guides users toward high-value actions — from product exploration to inquiry submissions and boutique appointment bookings.
- Revamp the website architecture: Build a scalable foundation with a future-ready sitemap and structure, capable of supporting a redesigned eCommerce module and future initiatives.
- Streamline content management and other workflows: Empower internal teams to easily manage content, launch localized campaigns, and improve time-to-market.
- Boost digital engagement: Reduce bounce rates and increase session duration by delivering high-value content and optimizing the overall user experience.
Solutions
Kick-Off: Aligning Vision, Scope, and Technical Foundations
The project began with a week of in-depth workshops on-site at The Hour Glass HQ in Singapore.
We worked closely with The Hour Glass’s Project Management Offices (PMOs) and teams to align IT, Marketing, E-Commerce, and Retail from the start. By uniting business, design, and tech priorities early on, we set a strong foundation for delivery — focusing on four key areas:
- Technical Set-Up & Governance: Confirming current content and product management workflows, tools, and processes
- Product, Website Article & Media Content: Understanding product taxonomy, media strategy, and content priorities
- Design, Visual Identity, Sitemap & Navigation: Aligning on user journey expectations, visual direction, and sitemap logic
- Business & Conversion: Mapping digital features to commercial and branding goals
These sessions helped us gain a deep understanding of The Hour Glass’s internal processes and strategic vision while ensuring full alignment across departments.
In parallel, a dedicated Technical Kick-Off phase was conducted to anticipate backend challenges and accelerate development readiness. This ensured alignment across both strategy and tech from day one.
This resulted in a tailored execution plan to redesign the core CMS and eCommerce experience with a premium UX, and to expand digital capabilities through future-ready integrations.
Website Design: Building a Premium, Conversion-Driven User Experience
Revamping The Hour Glass Website’s Content Management System
Working together to reimagine the retailer’s digital presence from the ground up, we shared the same ambition: crafting a premium website experience that not only reflected The Hour Glass’s standing in the world of horology but also drove measurable conversion, from online appointment requests to increased foot traffic in boutiques.
Together, we focused on a five-point methodology:
Cross-functional workshops involving key stakeholders from Marketing, Business, HR, Retail, and IT teams ensured alignment from the start. These sessions helped uncover user goals, friction points, and untapped conversion opportunities — shaping both the experience strategy and execution roadmap.
We also conducted a comprehensive UX audit of the existing website and best-in-class benchmarking across prestigious watch brands, multi-brand distributors, and digital pioneers in other categories.
This enabled us to identify six key opportunities to improve the website design and user journey:
- Enhancing navigation: Streamlining key features to make content easier to explore
- Simplifying the sitemap: Restructuring site layers for a user-friendly browsing experience
- Strengthening storytelling: Refining content to highlight brand values, partnerships, and vision
- Clarifying the user journey: Simplifying paths to help users reach the right content faster
- Increasing interactivity: Introducing dynamic content to showcase collections
- Unifying the experience: Ensuring unified performance and experience across all touchpoints
Every design decision was backed by a Design Rationale Document — tying each visual and structural change to the brand’s mission of “Advancing Watch Culture” and the real-world needs of its audience.
Reimagining E-Commerce, The Hour Glass Way
The next step centered on redefining the e-commerce module, rethinking how high-end retail and digital commerce could coexist in a hybrid retail model. Unlike traditional e-commerce platforms, The Hour Glass offers only a curated selection of products for online purchases.
This approach was influenced by the varying strategies of its brand partners:
- Some prestigious watchmakers emphasize personalized service through online (request submission) or in-store clienteling to maintain their exclusive and prestigious brand image.
- Others prioritize a seamless e-commerce presence as part of their partnership requirements.
In this way, we co-designed a refined shopping journey with e-commerce components tailored to the retailer and its selected brand partners’ requests.
Key enhancements included:
- Attractive Call-to-Action buttons and animations based on product availability for online purchases
- Dynamic shopping bag
- Efficient order process, with auto-confirmation emails sent to both boutiques and customers — enabling seamless fulfillment
Website Development: Delivering a Robust, Scalable Digital Foundation
To bring The Hour Glass’s digital vision to life, we also led the full-stack development of a future-ready platform — transforming the approved UI/UX into a secure, high-performance website built for scale.
The development unfolded in two major phases, each focused on ensuring platform robustness, future extensibility, and seamless integration with the retailer’s global operations.
CMS Website Development
The website’s front-end infrastructure was built using React.js and Next.js technologies for performance, modularity, and SEO-friendliness, while WordPress powered the content management and server-side logic.
We stretched the capabilities of WordPress CMS with the complex setup of:
- A modular, secure architecture tailored to the group’s operational needs
- A multi-site, multi-language system enabling ease of content localization and governance (i.e., a user can publish a webpage on all 8 localized websites from a single backend)
- IT Consultis’ proprietary Page Builder for flexible content management and faster adoption thanks to a user-friendly UI
- Region-specific user permissions for decentralized team access
To ensure real-time synchronization across platforms, we also connected WordPress with the retailer’s CRM and other internal systems for live updates on inquiries, appointments, inventory, and user behavior.
E-Commerce Module Development
With the main platform established, the next step focused on enabling e-commerce capabilities through WordPress’s WooCommerce.
Key missions included integrating:
- A dual control point for inventory management, leveraging the internal CRM and WooCommerce
- Payment gateways with real-time sync and Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance setup
Together, these developments ensured that the new CMS and e-commerce website were not only visually refined but also operationally agile.
Results
Through close collaboration, we successfully elevated The Hour Glass’s digital presence across 8 key markets — delivering a redesigned, enterprise-grade platform that aligns with its mission to advance watch culture globally.
The revamped platform enabled a significant business impact:
- Enhanced Customer Experience: The new website delivers a premium, intuitive user journey, optimized for both mobile and desktop — reinforcing brand equity and attracting digitally savvy audiences across APAC.
- Increased Engagement and Conversions: A streamlined UX, restructured content architecture, and localized touchpoints led to increases in key actions such as inquiry submissions, appointment bookings, and boutique visits.
- Operational Empowerment: The centralized WordPress CMS now enables regional teams to independently manage content for over 50 global brand partners across 8 different countries, ensuring consistent storytelling and localized campaign rollouts.
- Future-Ready Infrastructure: With a flexible back-end architecture and scalable design, the platform is primed to support the retailer’s next digital evolution.
Most importantly, this project exemplified the balance between global design ambition and local tech realities — integrating legacy systems, customizing CMS workflows for cross-border teams, and enabling scalable content localization in Asia’s most dynamic markets.
