Charles Fox Luxury E-commerce

Overview

The foundational engineering for the digital home of Charles Fox, a UK luxury jeweller and watch retailer carrying Rolex, Tag Heuer, Breitling, and Omega. I architected the core platform and shipped the foundational commerce surfaces; the site is live in production today and continues to evolve under subsequent development teams.

Working under Catalyst's brand strategy and creative direction, I owned the foundational engineering — frontend architecture, the core commerce surfaces, the CMS workflow, and the legacy-system data extraction. The build was phased: watches first, jewellery later, with the brief explicitly framed as "ship a strong foundation that future teams can extend."

What I Built

Frontend Architecture and Core Surfaces

• Next.js + Sanity CMS stack designed from scratch — chosen and structured to give Charles Fox a maintainable content workflow long after the initial build.
• Foundational commerce pages: homepage, Rolex collection page, shopping cart, contact and inquiry flow with email pipeline, and the finance-calculator UI embedded in product detail pages.
• Luxury-grade UX patterns referenced from established UK watch retailers (Laings, Brufords) — mega-menu navigation, refined product card layouts, filtering and sorting, all tuned to the standards luxury buyers expect.
• Sanity content model structured for the multi-brand catalogue (Rolex, Tag Heuer, Breitling, Omega) and extensible to the jewellery phase.

Legacy ERP Data Migration

The client's existing inventory lived in a long-running legacy ERP (Clarity & Success) with no usable API for modern integration. I engineered a data-extraction layer in Node.js that pulled product information out of the legacy system — schema-guessing where documentation didn't exist — and seeded it cleanly into the Sanity-backed catalogue. This is the kind of unglamorous but project-critical work that determines whether a luxury e-commerce build ships at all.

Finance and Payments UI

I built the customer-facing UI surfaces for finance and payment flows — including the Novuna finance-calculator popup embedded in product pages. The full payment-gateway integration (Planet Payments) and Novuna credit-approval back-end were completed by subsequent development teams once the foundational build was in place.

Why It Matters

A luxury e-commerce platform isn't judged on its launch screenshot — it's judged on whether the codebase is clean enough for the next team to keep building on, whether the content workflow is something the client can actually run, and whether the core surfaces feel right to a customer about to spend five figures on a watch. The site continues to operate today, and the foundation I shipped is still under it.