Written by: Graham Walker of Design by Gray
Date: 17th November 2023
Image: Jack Connor of Brindle Distillery & Graham Walker

A new and improved online shopping and booking experience and worthy showcase for Cuckoo’s award-winning spirits

The new Brindle Distillery website launched last week, offering a more engaging, informative and improved user experience for customers. Whether you are stocking up on your favourite Cuckoo spirit, searching for the ideal gift for a friend or booking one of our exciting experiences or events at the distillery, our online experience has been made quicker, slicker and more visually appealing.

Growth forces change

While our good old website had served us well, launching in conjunction with our very first batch of Cuckoo Gin in 2017, following the subsequent growth of our range of spirits and offerings at the distillery, as well as the evolution of our brand look and feel, our business had gradually outgrown our website.

Designed and built locally, our new and much improved website is now fit for purpose. We’re confident that it will meet the expectations and demands of our customers today and into the future.

Key website improvements

Visually, the changes are obvious right from when you land on the new Home page, with our award-winning range of Cuckoo Gin showcased front and centre, and an enhanced presence of distillery experiences and events. Further key improvements are revealed as you navigate through the site. These include:

• Improved navigation – a clear and easy to navigate menu structure is a website essential, so on the desktop version of our new website, customers are presented with an image-led dropdown, highlighting our range of spirits with simple 3-word description to aid decision making and allowing quick and direct access to products and our shop
• Beautiful product pages – showcasing our products offline is easy – the beautiful, tactile packaging and award-winning taste speaks for itself. To do this online, we’ve created new visually stunning, engaging and informative product pages that are so good you can almost taste it! Here, customers can discover everything they need to know about the spirit, including flavour profile, tasting notes, ingredients, distiller notes and cocktail inspiration.
• Buy online quicker – to help customers complete their visit in as little time as possible, our spirits product pages can be accessed in one click from anywhere on the site.
• Reinvented events calendar – we now host more live events and bar nights at the distillery than ever before. Taking inspiration from the websites of entertainment venues, our new events calendar interface has been designed to display events in a clear, logical and user-friendly way, featuring pictures of artists and booking links.
• Easier event and experience bookings – our bookings page has been redesigned with clear instructions on how to find availability and easily book your tickets online
• More mobile friendly – statistically, websites are accessed more through mobile devices now than desktop computers, so we carefully designed our new website to offer customers an equally positive experience whatever their preferred device

 

A local collaboration

Local branding and design studio, Design by Gray, have been instrumental in the establishment and growth of the Cuckoo Gin and Brindle Distillery brands and, like our old website (which they also designed), have been with us from the start.

Design by Gray set about creating a completely new and refreshed design and layout for our website, with the aim of bringing the look and feel more closely in line with the visual style of our brands, whilst giving careful consideration to improvements to the overall user experience.

We also brought on board another local business, TLH Marketing, whose technically knowledgeable web development team were responsible for building the website and implementing new features, including the bespoke events calendar, based on the designs created by Design by Gray.

This close collaboration of two highly regarded local agencies worked well and allowed us to tap into the necessary design and technical expertise required to take our online presence to the next level.

Final thoughts

We’re really pleased with how the new Brindle Distillery website both looks and functions, and we hope our customers will enjoy and take advantage of the new and improved features. Thank you to everyone who has been involved in the process.

You are most likely reading this on our new website and, if so, welcome! Let us know what you think by sending an email to info@brindledistillery.co.uk If you’re reading this elsewhere, visit brindledistillery.co.uk to experience the improvements and maybe treat yourself to a bottle of our award-winning gin while you’re there! Cheers!