thebotanist.com · Premium DTC ecommerce
The Botanist homepage
01 / Context
An Islay gin with a mixology habit
The Botanist is a super-premium dry gin made at Bruichladdich Distillery on Islay, using wild Islay botanicals foraged on the island. The brand sits within Rémy Cointreau’s spirits portfolio alongside Bruichladdich, Port Charlotte and Octomore.
For most of its life the brand was a single product in various sizes; it has since expanded to include Aged Gin and Hebridean Strength. The site had to do three jobs that pull in different directions: convert (DTC and amplify retail), educate (a 22-botanical provenance story that needs telling without overwhelming the buyer), and serve as a brand-led platform for cocktail culture rather than a transactional gin shop.
02 / Platform
Three platforms in nine years
The site went through three generations during my tenure. Each replatform was a deliberate decision, not a default.
One
Drupal Commerce: agency-built
The starting state when I took the role. Powerful CMS, but the commerce layer was high-friction to maintain and the editorial flexibility needed for the cocktail and brand storytelling sections didn’t justify the engineering cost.
Two
WooCommerce: designed, built and maintained by me
I rebuilt the site on WordPress and WooCommerce and ran it as a one-person operation for several years. The period closest to the metal: theming, performance, the regulatory plumbing that comes with alcohol DTC, integrations. Direct ownership of every UX detail, and the operational discipline that comes from being the person paged when something breaks.
Three
Shopify Plus: agency-built, my supervision
The 2024 generation. By this point the brand needed enterprise-grade DTC tooling, payment and tax infrastructure across multiple markets, and a maintainable theme that didn’t depend on me being available. The role shifted from builder to design lead overseeing agency delivery, with full ownership of design, IA, UX and brand expression. This is the generation the rest of this case study covers.
03 / Information Architecture
Cocktail-led information architecture
The brand’s culture sits in mixology more than in distillation provenance. The information architecture reflects that: Cocktails is a peer-level destination alongside the product range, not filed under content or blog.
A first-time visitor can navigate the site through “what do I make with this” rather than “what is this”, which matches how people actually arrive at the brand. The decision pushed every downstream template choice: recipe pages got more weight than article pages, garnish and method imagery sat next to bottle photography, and the homepage gave cocktails real estate equal to the range.
Foraged Cocktail CLP
04 / Editorial
Editorial rhythm on the news landing page
A two-column scroll where one column holds fixed while the editorial column scrolls. The pattern reads as editorial rather than blog, which suits a brand that publishes occasionally and weightily rather than constantly. It also handles long-form features and short news items in the same template without the visual rhythm collapsing.
Detail of News landing page
05 / PDP
Product variation UX on the PDP
The range grew during the project from a single product in size variants to multiple expressions (Aged Gin, Hebridean Strength) each available in their own sizes. The variation pattern had to handle that growth without becoming a configurator. The bottle image and key product context hold steady while the variant context updates, so the customer doesn’t feel the page rebuild every time they switch.
Background creative: Thirst
06 / Cocktail Recipe Template
Cocktail recipes
The cocktail templates carry the brand’s mixology focus into long-form content. Recipe, method, garnish notes, and the specific Botanist expression for the build, all next to a hero image that has to compete with anyone’s Instagram feed for the same drink.
07 / Interactive 3D
Discover the Taste of the Wild campaign interactive
An interactive 3D model of the bottle rotates slowly on the page to reveal the campaign tagline as it turns, framed by a backdrop of the 22 Islay botanicals that go into the gin.
The decision to use 3D rather than a flat hero image was about texture and time. The bottle’s embossed glass and depth are part of its identity as an object, and rotation is the only way to show that in a browser. The slow pace creates a moment of attention that flat photography can’t earn. The botanical surround puts product and provenance in the same frame.
Botanical photography: Emlyn Firth
08 / Across the brand
Across the wider brand; Beyond digital
The site was one strand of broader brand work. Three further pieces from the same period sit alongside it: two physical objects and an in-shop spatial experience.
Planter: made from up-cycled botanist bottles
Herb Planter
Global Travel Retail gift pack. A 70cl bottle paired with a planter cut from the same glass bottle, available with three herb varieties. The customer grows their own cocktail garnish. Designed and engineered for manufacture.
Feature wall: the Botanist logo set into the living wall, Distillery shop
Living Wall
A 21.5m² interior living wall in the Bruichladdich Distillery shop, sited as a stop on the tasting tour. The brief, location and integration with the tour were mine; planting plan and installation were by Scotscape as specialist partner. The 3D Botanist brand logo sign at the centre of the wall is my authored design.
Tincture box: 22 numbered tinctures behind a sliding plywood lid
Tincture Box
Brand ambassador toolkit. A hand-made educational kit containing tinctures of all 22 Islay botanicals plus raw spirit, with a card deck describing each plant in habitat. Used by brand ambassadors to teach the gin’s provenance through smell and taste rather than slides.
09 / Reflection
What I take from it
This was a long tenure rather than a single project, and the work I’m most confident about is the operational continuity. A brand site that survived two replatforms, regulatory shifts in alcohol DTC, and a product range that more than tripled in scope, without losing the editorial tone or the cocktail-first IA bet that defined the early generations.
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