Case study · Sipello
New website for an Award-Winning Drink Brand
Client Location
Sipello, UK
Technology
WordPress
WooCommerce
Scroll-driven animation
Overview
About the project
Sipello is a bittersweet British aperitif, made by hand in the Surrey Hills from gooseberry, rhubarb, chuckleberry and sustainably sourced botanicals such as gentian, wormwood and sandalwood. Its founder, Tim Simmons, spent two years perfecting the recipe. During lockdown he cycled more than 700km across London to put samples in front of leading bartenders.
We designed and built the website Sipello launched with in October 2021, and we have hosted and looked after it ever since. Five years on, with the brand winning awards and on the menu at some of London’s best-known bars, we rebuilt the site from the ground up.
The brief
The challenge
For the launch, Sipello needed a website that matched the care that had gone into the drink. The bottle and label were finished: a hand-drawn midnight garden party in deep blue and gold. The site had to carry that look, tell the story behind the drink and sell bottles from the first day, both to bartenders deciding whether to stock it and to drinkers at home.
By 2026 the original site was showing its age. It relied on a page builder and a set of slider and grid plugins that no longer received updates, so it was slow to change and heavy to load. The illustration, Sipello’s strongest asset, sat on the homepage as one flat image, and the shop needed a modern basket and checkout.
What we built
The solution
For the launch we ran a workshop to understand the brand, its audience and what visitors needed to find, then agreed wireframes and a prototype before building. The design followed the label, with gold lettering framed on deep blue and colour blends taken from mixology, and a short film with a Jazz Age soundtrack introduced the drink. The brand went on to win gold at the World Brand Design Awards, and Sipello is now poured at The Ned, the Four Seasons and the Merry Harriers.
For the rebuild we went back to the original illustration files and split the scene into layers that move at different speeds as you scroll, with the bottle stepping out of the party into the next section. The ingredient journey pins in place and travels through each botanical and where it is grown, and every cocktail opens into a full recipe marked up so search engines can read it.
Behind the scenes, a lightweight custom WordPress theme replaces the page builder, and Sipello’s own plugin holds the recipes, ingredients and age check so they survive any future redesign. The shop runs on WooCommerce’s block checkout with card, Apple Pay, Google Pay and Klarna payments, and the old unsupported plugins are gone.
