Cardrona Distillery produces fine spirits including gin, vodka, whisky, and liqueur using ingredients harvested from New Zealand’s Southern Alps. N4 worked alongside Cardona to elevate their digital experience to mirror the essence of their spirits; premium quality that showcases the strong connection between the products and the pristine environment from whence they came.
Details
Cardrona wanted their next evolution to focus on a digital-first experience for their customers. We reverse-engineered their branding to understand how best to rebuild it in a way that spoke more authentically to Cardrona’s redefined goals.
Early in the process, during the briefing stage, we decided that Cardrona’s individuality, purity, and relationship with New Zealand’s South Island would become the brand’s hallmark. The decision to champion these qualities would shape how Cardrona appealed to their global customer base — through the beauty of craftsmanship and geographical connection.
The conceptual phase began with an intimate exploration of Cardrona Distillery’s products and location, drawing parallels between the ingredients and the land. We examined how best to frame these elements to create an immersive online experience that closed with a seamless customer journey to purchasing.
Feedback from customer surveys we deployed helped us adjust our approach as we developed concepts for the online experience. This information led us to a distinct design that would embrace customer preferences for optimal engagement.
The resulting website brings users on a dynamic tour through Cardrona’s catalogue and breathtaking locations. We created intuitive navigation to encourage visitors to find their own way, flowing through the site naturally.
We included seamless transitions and purposeful animations to provide a playful user experience. Although subtle, these motion features would breathe organic movement into the website, grounding the online experience in something more natural and reflective of the Cardrona Valley.
In creating a synergistic design that enhanced Cardrona’s brand and location we utilised a clean and minimalistic canvas for the backdrop to vivid imagery and videos that showcase the beauty of the distillery. This bold contrast between the background and assets is visually refreshing and avoids diluting the powerful photography.
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