What we learned shipping Spirit Embassy
Notes from building a premium whisky store: restraint, photography and the details that make commerce feel considered.
Spirit Embassy was our first large e-commerce project, and it taught us more than any brief before it. A few lessons we’ll carry into every store we build.
Premium is mostly restraint
Our early designs had too much on every page. Each round, we took something away — a badge, a banner, a second call to action. The store got calmer and the bottles got more attention. Conversion went up, not down.
Photography does the selling
No layout can rescue a weak product photo. We planned the photography alongside the design, so every image had a job: the bottle, the label, the pour. The site’s structure follows the shoot, not the other way round.
Discovery beats search
Most visitors don’t arrive knowing which bottle they want. Curated collections, tasting notes and gentle filters — by flavour, region, occasion — turned browsing into something closer to a conversation with a good shopkeeper.
The website finally feels like the world our bottles belong to.
We’re proud of where it landed, and even prouder of how much we learned getting there.