This article offers a contextualised explanation of the process of institutional bridging by Delta, a British SME, in order to internationalise to China across high institutional distance. The study uncovers three novel mechanisms of ‘Cross-institutional Dissonance Mitigation’, ‘Multi-level Strategic Embedding’, and ‘Cross-institutional Consonance Retuning’ to explain how and why a failing SME with limited resources and networks was able to bridge the institutional distance and internationalise to the challenging Chinese market. This article contributes to the literature on SME internationalisation across high institutional distance by opening the ‘black box’ of SME institutional bridging, hence demonstrating the benefits of contextualised explanations to extend research into internationalisation phenomena that span multiple institutional boundaries.