York Gin: A webshop as distinctive as York Gin's home cityYork Gin: A webshop as distinctive as York Gin's home city

Case study · York Gin

A webshop as distinctive as York Gin's home city.

A redesigned BigCommerce webshop for York Gin, the award-winning independent distillery, and a marketing strategy its own team could run.

Delivered by Agency51, the PureNet Group’s BigCommerce and digital marketing agency.

The challenge

York Gin makes some of the world’s finest gins by traditional, sustainable methods, and has sold more than 5,000,000 litres. Its award-winning gin shop is in a 16th-century building at the heart of York. Its webshop, though, looked tired and generic, nothing like the brand.

York Gin needed a store that matched its passion and its home, made it easy for loyal customers to find what they wanted, and that its own team could keep up to date.

The York Gin home page on a laptop

York Gin

The project

Agency51’s designers visited York Gin’s shop and photographed its textures, details and colours to understand the brand. The new design draws on its signature colours, uses a fresh typeface that feels like York Gin, and puts the award-winning bottles at the top of the page, letting the gin do most of the talking, with the story of the business close by.

York Gin already had a marketing team, so it didn’t need everything done for it. Agency51 set up its SEO, PPC, conversion optimisation and email for long-term success, then stayed on hand: SEO specialists to answer questions, designers for email campaigns, writers for copy and a PPC team to fine-tune the ads.

York Gin’s product range on a tablet

York Gin

The results

York Gin now has a webshop that is unmistakably its own, sells across the UK and the world, and can be updated by its own team. The site has had more than 300,000 sessions in three years and more than 7,700 sales since the redesign, including its best Christmas since launch. Conversion is up 10% year on year and revenue from marketing more than 7%.

York Gin

“Our website was looking tired and needed some more powerful features to offer better deals to our ecommerce customers. Having chosen BigCommerce as our platform, it became clear quickly that we really did need expert support. Agency 51 have proved themselves to be everything we hoped – responsive, supportive and very skilled. We can’t rate them highly enough – their customer care is absolutely first rate; they avoid jargon and achieve results. Superb”

Emma Godivala, Director, York Gin