Banks and Bloom Website Development

As a bespoke brand and distiller, Banks and Bloom's core ethos focuses on the purity of ingredients, sustainability, and transparency within food production. With its founders aiming to champion underutilised native ingredients (all responsibly sourced from remote and regional growers), the brand is a result of collaborations between scientists, winemakers, and hospitality professionals, all bringing their own unique wealth of knowledge to the table.  

Sitting at the crossroads of where science and creativity collide through using cutting-edge distillation methods, they focus on their premise of ‘science meets art’. Collaborating closely, we worked to understand how to best present this truly unique brand vision and ethos by understanding both their business and project goals. Driving a fresh brand vision forward, their previous website wasn’t meeting their business goals. To coincide with the launch of their RTD (ready-to-drink) range and their new brand vision, they wished to retain existing brand elements whilst overhauling the overall vision and branding.  

The new website solution needed to focus on simple eCommerce functionality whilst providing information on the unique brand story and vision to users. As a product-based business with an ever-growing stockist base, it was also imperative that the click-to-cart process was seamless.  

Although primarily aimed to be used as an eCommerce website, Banks and Bloom also saw the solution as a tool for brand awareness and storytelling around their focus on sustainability, transparency, and conservation.  

Short term, their project goals included:

• Repositioning the brand on the website
• The web presence to reflect the new brand look and feel 
• A better framework to position for the product range extension into RTDs

Longer term, their project goals included:

• Increasing sales 
• Establishment of an exclusive gin club (with the aim to extend to a national and ultimately, international focus)

Following a comprehensive discovery and understanding of their business goals, it was decided to shift the old WordPress based website onto a new CMS. The new website was methodically built using Umbraco CMS (Content Management System), adopting a modular build approach. Given the strong eCommerce project focus, we seamlessly integrated Shopify with Umbraco, with the Shopify integration resulting in significant advantages, including:   

• Enhanced convenience 
• Simplified content editing 
• On-demand data, and 
• Reduced manual updating. 

This robust integration offers unparalleled content editing convenience, ensuring synchronisation and reducing content administration. For instance, if Banks and Bloom were to introduce 5 new RTDs overnight, all corresponding product information would be automatically extracted from Shopify, negating the need for Banks and Bloom staff to make manual additions.   

Aligned with the launch of their RTD (ready-to-drink) range and the unveiling of their new brand vision, the decision was made to revamp the entire vision and branding while retaining existing imagery and brand elements. A recipe widget was also seamlessly incorporated throughout the website to enhance user engagement. 

Given the diverse customer base ranging from seasoned gin enthusiasts knowledgeable about various production processes to distributors and casual RTD consumers, Banks and Bloom had multiple user groups to engage through their website. However, the common expectation amongst all users was a seamless click-to-cart experience, a feature now facilitated by the new website. 

Whilst the website was undergoing the development stage, we took a proactive approach by crafting a placeholder landing page (with imagery below).

Strategically, this provided not only an anticipatory glimpse of the final website but was an opportunity to showcase some key design elements.