Blackwood Estate bottled small-batch premium whisky sold through specialist retailers and, increasingly, direct to collectors. Their digital presence was a holding page and a Facebook account — adequate for a brand with no ambitions, which they no longer were. A series of limited releases was planned, and the team understood that scarcity marketing only works if you own the audience. Renting attention from social platforms would not build a collector base.
The brief had real regulatory weight: alcohol marketing requires age verification, and the rules differ by market, so the gate had to be jurisdiction-aware rather than a decorative 'are you 18?' checkbox. Beyond compliance, they needed a stockist locator covering their 300+ retail partners, a tasting-notes CMS so each expression could be presented with the depth whisky people expect, and a mechanism for limited releases — a countdown and allocation system that could capture demand before a bottling went live, and convert it in minutes when it did.
An age-verification layer that adapts its messaging and legal drinking age to the visitor's market, persists verification, and keeps bounce under 8% — compliance without killing the first impression.
A searchable, filterable map of 300+ specialist retailers with per-stockist listings of available expressions — driving footfall to partners instead of cannibalising them.
A structured system for presenting each expression: nose, palate, finish, cask details and bottling notes — giving collectors the technical depth they use to justify a purchase.
A release mechanism combining countdown pages, allocation email capture and a controlled on-sale moment — turning each bottling into an event with a ready-made queue of buyers.
Emails captured ahead of the first limited release — a owned collector audience built from zero in under a year.
Time to sell out the debut limited bottling after the countdown engine opened allocations — with zero paid media.
Direct (non-retail) traffic growth year on year, as the site became the brand's primary storytelling and allocation channel.
// results vary by project — ask us how we measured this one
“We stopped announcing releases into the void. Now twelve thousand collectors are waiting when the countdown hits zero — the whisky sells itself before we finish the sentence.”
Brand Director, Blackwood Estate · name withheld under NDA — reference call availableWholesale portals, dealer logins and integrations with the systems you already run. Tell us what slows your sales team down — we will scope it, price it and ship it.
