Beatriz runs a small watch brand out of Barcelona. Sapphire crystal cases, automatic movements sourced from Switzerland, retail price between 450 and 900 euros. Not a house with a hundred years of history behind it. A brand trying to earn a place between the mass smartwatch shelf and the Rolex display case, and in China that gap is narrower than she expected.
Her Tmall Global store had been live for eight months when she asked GMA to look at it. Traffic was fine, around 9,000 monthly visits, mostly paid search plus a few unpaid Xiaohongshu mentions she hadn’t asked for. Conversion sat under 0.5%. Monthly revenue hovered around 38,000 RMB, which didn’t clear ad spend and platform fees most months.
The first fix her team tried was more content. WeChat articles about the Barcelona workshop, the Swiss movement supplier, the leather tannery. Decent writing, almost no readers outside the small group who already followed the account. WeChat rewards brands that already have an audience. Beatriz didn’t have one yet, so the content sat there unread.
What actually moved the numbers wasn’t more content, it was where the content lived and what it proved. We shifted budget to Xiaohongshu and built it around two things Chinese buyers search for before this kind of purchase: real footage of the movement being assembled, not a polished brand film, and a documented authentication process, serial number lookup, a two-year international warranty explained in Chinese with service centers listed by city. Within four months, Tmall revenue passed 96,000 RMB a month, conversion moved to 1.3%, and about a quarter of new buyers had already searched the brand name on Xiaohongshu before landing on the store. It worked because Xiaohongshu is where these buyers go to check whether a watch is real and whether it holds its value, not to be sold to. Answering that question was the sale.
I’m Olivier Verot, founder of GMA. I’ve run China market entry from Shanghai since 2012, and watch brands are a category I keep coming back to, because the playbook that worked for the big houses ten years ago doesn’t work for a brand still building its name.
1. The entry-level shelf is gone, and a connected watch bought it
China’s watch market split in two, and the split changed what a mid-tier foreign brand is actually competing against, whether or not it markets itself alongside the rest of China’s online luxury market. In 2025, adult smartwatches sold 21.3 million units online in China, up 15.6% year on year, for 24.5 billion RMB in revenue, up a striking 50.8%, at an average price of 1,147 RMB (OFweek wearable device data). Huawei alone holds 24.5% of that market and grew 46.8% in a single year. Apple sits at 16.5%, Xiaomi at 8.8%. Between them, the top five brands own 58.4% of every smartwatch sold online.
Those numbers matter for a brand at that price point because the buyer who used to enter the category with a 200 to 400 euro Swiss-movement watch now buys a Huawei Watch instead, gets a heart rate monitor and payment chip thrown in, and doesn’t think of it as a downgrade. The entry point of the mechanical watch market didn’t shrink gradually. It got replaced by a different product category entirely. A brand at that price point can no longer win on function. It has to win on meaning: craft, story, the fact that a mechanical movement is a small machine a person built, not a sensor. Marketing a mid-range watch in China in 2026 means dropping every argument that sounds like a spec sheet and keeping only the ones a smartwatch can’t touch.
2. Trust gets decided before the sale, on the secondhand market
China’s secondhand luxury market crossed 150 billion RMB in 2026, growing at more than 22% a year, faster than new luxury sales (Sina Finance industry analysis, July 2026). Watches are the single biggest category inside it: secondhand high-end watch transactions passed 8.5 billion RMB, with growth forecast above 50% for the year. In Shanghai alone, the local secondhand luxury market hit 10.8 billion RMB, up 28.3%, and watches accounted for more than 42% of that value, ahead of bags and jewelry.
What that means for a brand still building its name: Chinese buyers of a watch in this price range are already thinking about resale before they buy new. They check whether the model holds value, whether authentication is easy, whether the brand shows up clean on platforms like verified resale and authentication channels, before they check the price. Counterfeiting pressure on watches has pushed several of these platforms (得物/Poizon and 红布林/Plum among the best known) to build in-house authentication teams and publish their verification standards publicly. A brand that never appears on any of them, that has no documented serial number system, that a buyer can’t verify past the product page, loses the argument before it starts. Registering your models with the main authentication platforms and publishing your own verification process isn’t defensive housekeeping anymore. It’s a first-line sales argument.
3. WeChat: give your brand a universe, not a discount code
Chinese consumers get hit with commercial offers constantly, so a WeChat feed that only pushes discounts gets muted fast. WeChat still works, but as a place to build the world your brand lives in rather than a place to sell directly. Two things make that work: content about the world the watch comes from, the workshop, the movement, the material, not just the product; and distribution through the right groups and accounts, not just your own follower base.
Rado did this well with a WeChat campaign that combined a sports event with the launch of a specific watch, using the event’s audience instead of buying cold traffic.
4. Xiaohongshu is where the decision actually gets made
For a considered purchase like a watch, Xiaohongshu has become the step between wanting one and buying one. A buyer searches the brand name, then “买之前” (before you buy) or “值不值” (worth it or not), reads unboxings, compares against smartwatch alternatives, checks whether the price on Tmall matches what a 买手 (personal shopper account) is offering. Xiaohongshu functions as a search engine for exactly this kind of research, closer to how someone would use Google before a big purchase than how they’d browse Instagram.
The mechanism worth understanding is KOC plus affiliation. Instead of paying one large KOL for a single polished post, brands seed the same message across dozens of smaller accounts (KOCs, key opinion consumers) who post honest-feeling reviews and earn a commission on sales tracked through their link. Volume and repetition build the impression that “everyone is talking about this watch,” which is what actually drives search intent, more than any single celebrity post would. This only works if the product survives the honesty of a KOC review, which is exactly why the authentication and craft argument from sections 1 and 2 has to come first.
5. Make people play with your brand, not just look at it
Piaget once let users turn a Valentine’s Day message into a short customized poem tied to the brand’s imagery. Simple mechanic, but it pulled people into the brand’s world instead of just showing it to them.
The same logic works on Xiaohongshu today: a comparison challenge (“guess the price”), a short video of the assembly process with a quiz, anything that asks the buyer to do something rather than just scroll past a product shot. Participation is what gets remembered and reshared. A static ad isn’t.
6. After-sales service is the reassurance argument, not an afterthought
Chinese buyers of a watch in this price range expect a service network before they buy, not after something breaks. A WeChat mini-program that lets a buyer register their serial number, see warranty status, and book a service appointment by city does more for conversion than another product photo. Add a basic AI customer service layer on top of it, one that can answer “is my watch still under warranty” or “where’s the nearest service point” instantly in Chinese, and route anything more complex to a human, and you’ve removed the single biggest fear a buyer has about a foreign brand: what happens if something goes wrong and there’s no one to call. A WeChat CRM built for this also gives you a channel to sell the second watch to the same buyer two years later, which matters more for a brand still building repeat customers than one more acquisition campaign.
7. The daigou channel isn’t dead, and it sets your real price
Personal shoppers buying watches abroad and reselling them through WeChat Moments or private groups have been part of this market for over a decade, and they haven’t gone away just because official cross-border channels exist now. Chinese customs tightened enforcement on daigou imports through 2026, with coordinated checks on undeclared goods carried in luggage (Chinese customs enforcement reporting, March 2026), but the price gap that makes daigou worthwhile, driven by import duties and consumption tax on watches sold through official domestic channels, hasn’t closed. For a brand in this price range, this shows up as a buyer who found the same model 15% cheaper from someone’s cousin who was in Madrid last month, with no invoice and no local warranty.
You can’t police every reseller, but you can make the official channel win on something daigou can’t offer: local warranty registration, verified authenticity tied to a serial number, and a service network. That’s the same argument from section 6, and it’s the reason pricing discipline (one global MSRP, not a Tmall price that quietly discounts against your own boutique price) matters more in China than in most markets. A buyer who catches your official price undercutting itself stops trusting either number.
What O2O still means in 2026
TAG Heuer’s “treasure hunt” QR campaign, sending exhibition visitors on a scavenger hunt for digital keys, some hidden in physical flash drives, was a clever example of pulling people from an online prompt into a physical space. The specific mechanic is dated, but the principle holds: a scan-to-verify code on the watch itself, linking to the same authentication and warranty system from section 6, does the modern version of the same job in a boutique.
The same logic applies at a duty-free counter for outbound Chinese travelers, still a real exposure channel, but visibility there counts for less than it used to. A buyer standing at the airport counter checks the price and the brand on their phone before deciding, banner or not, which is one more reason sections 1 through 6 matter more than the display case itself. That’s also true for one of the categories foreign brands most often get wrong on visibility versus substance, covered in this rundown of common mistakes luxury brands make in China.
What to do this Monday
Stop competing with Huawei and Xiaomi on features. Get your model registered on at least one recognized authentication or resale platform before you push acquisition spend. Move your content budget toward Xiaohongshu and a KOC-plus-affiliation structure rather than one big campaign. Build the WeChat mini-program for warranty and service before you need it for a complaint. And hold your price consistent everywhere it’s sold, official channel included, because daigou will find the gap if you leave one.
FAQ
Do I need a Chinese business entity to sell a watch brand into China?
Not to start. Tmall Global and other cross-border channels let you sell to Chinese consumers without a local entity or import license, with goods held in bonded warehouses. You’ll want a WeChat official account and mini-program regardless, which don’t require a local entity either. A local entity becomes worth it once you’re opening physical points of sale or need a domestic warranty and repair operation at scale.
How long before a watch brand sees real sales movement in China?
Budget four to six months before the shift from content to conversion shows up, based on what we’ve seen across similar brands. The first stretch goes into building enough Xiaohongshu presence and authentication signal that a search on your brand name returns something reassuring. Move too fast into paid acquisition before that groundwork exists and you’re paying to send traffic to a store with no trust signals, which is expensive and doesn’t convert.
Should I worry about counterfeits before I even have real volume in China?
Yes, earlier than feels necessary. Counterfeiters don’t wait for you to be established, and a brand with no visible authentication process is an easier target, not a smaller one. Registering your trademark in China and setting up even a basic serial number verification page costs little compared to the damage of a buyer finding a fake before they find you.
GMA has run digital entry for watch and jewelry brands into China since 2016, from authentication-led Xiaohongshu campaigns to WeChat mini-program warranty systems built to survive the daigou question, not avoid it. If you’re trying to position a mid-tier watch brand against both the smartwatch shelf and the secondhand market, get in touch with our team.
