Unlocking Shopify’s latest features to create a premium brand experience

Cotswolds Distillery was born from a dream to produce delicious spirits in one of the most beautiful regions in the world.

Driven by passion, quality, innovation and inclusivity, Cotswolds Distillery came to Propeller looking for a sophisticated website which drove brand awareness and provided a streamlined online experience for their fast-growing customer base.

If, like Cotswolds Distillery, you want to build a website that reflects a premium brand, drives awareness, and converts, these are the things to consider…

Premium brands like Cotswolds Distillery need to offer a premium experience online, too. This doesn’t just mean what it looks like, but also what it feels like.

Cotswolds Distillery’s existing sitemap was overly complicated.. Not the elegant, quality experience they wanted for their brand.

We reorganised and streamlined the sitemap into four key areas: 

• Shop (ecommerce)
• Visit (in-person distillery experiences)
• About (brand story)
• Discover (cocktail recipes, news and blogs)

The creative design of the website unified the brand across the entire site. From the homepage to the cookie banner, every part of the site was styled with Cotswolds Distillery’s visual brand elements. The clean, streamlined design meant the site worked particularly well for mobile users, too.

Read more about our creative and UX work here.

“A gently beautiful, rolling landscape featuring sweeping meadows, the Cotswolds Distillery is like an impressionist painting.”

It sounds idyllic, right?! We wanted their customers’ online shopping experience to feel just as relaxing. So we implemented a host of new Shopify website design features to make things easy:

• Product filters and search functionality make finding the perfect product a breeze
• A wishlist entices users to return to the site
• A mini cart preview adds a simple ease to the shopping experience
• A customised discount flow gives the user clear visibility of the free gift promotion right when they add a product to their cart

Read more about our ecommerce services here.

Cotswolds Distillery doesn’t just sell English quality gins and whiskeys. They also host ‘Experiences’: tasting sessions and tours at their distillery nestled amongst the rolling hills of the Cotswolds countryside.

So rather than cross-selling whiskey to gin-drinkers and vice versa (they’re actually very different audiences!), they are more focused on tempting people to visit them in the Cotswolds.

We wanted to ensure that booking an experience online was as simple as buying a bottle of your favourite tipple. So we used a similar layout as the product landing pages, but we pulled out key information and used icons to display the experience clearly. 

We optimised the experience pages as much as possible for SEO by including useful information such as FAQs, ‘How to find us’ and customer testimonials.

Cotswolds Distillery wanted their customers to have a fantastic experience online, so improving site speed was of critical importance. 

Ensuring your website is performing at maximum speed is vital for many reasons including user experience, conversion, and SEO (read more about that here).

Cotswolds Distillery’s old Shopify site relied heavily on apps which slowed it down and bloated it with extra scripts. We replaced five apps with Klaviyo, giving them all the functionality in one easy to use platform.

To speed things up further, we used Shopify native functionality as much as possible:

• We used product tagging on the product detail pages for their ‘you may also like’ recommendation feature. 
• We used Shopify’s product API in the mini cart.
• We used native metafields for almost all of the customisation on the product detail pages.

And rather than using a landing page builder for the news and cocktail pages, we opted to use our own custom-built section blocks.

Cotswolds Distillery is a super fast-growing and hugely innovative brand. So it was vital for them to have the flexibility to manage their website internally.

We created 24 customisable sections, allowing them to present their content in creative ways.

Here are some examples of these sections in action:

• Timeline feature for how to craft whisky 
• People page for putting a face to the brand 
• Recipes for promoting products 

So rather than relying on a web development agency to add new content or landing pages, they can do it internally, quickly, easily, and beautifully.

We very much enjoyed working with Cotswolds Distillery on this project (not least because we got to sample their delicious whiskeys and gins!).

If you’d like to chat about how we can bring your brand to life, get in touch.

We are an ecommerce agency, unlocking Shopify website design features to optimise digital marketing for alcohol brands through SEO services, UX design, and web development.