The Drinks Drop - How an idea during lockdown turns into a website that delivers London Cocktail Week

It was the start of lockdown, late March 2020. We received a phone call from the team at Highball Brands to provide consultation on the brand creation and e-commerce strategy for their new business concept.

It was the start of lockdown, late March 2020. We received a phone call from the team at Highball Brands to provide consultation on the brand creation and e-commerce strategy for their new business concept. The idea - to create an online store experience to sell professionally made premium cocktails by some of London’s best bars to a national audience at home. We loved it!

The very nature of the home delivery service would help two fold. Firstly, there would be a role to play for the hospitality industry during an enforced premises closure. Secondly, ensuring those told to stay at home during the Covid-19 pandemic could stay in high spirits with cocktails from some of London’s best bars. Initial launched in London and Manchester, our design and development team worked quickly to establish The Drinks Drop website in a matter of days. Trading commenced, and The Drinks Drop has grown from strength to strength since.

Our e-commerce strategy was to develop The Drinks Drop website using the Shopify platform. As a Shopify Partner, we encourage our clients to work with the vast array of Shopify templates available, however allow our design team to turn a templated feel into a website that lives and breathes your brand. We’re driven to help our clients create online stores with a distinctive brand led look and feel.

We started out with a base Shopify theme - working to customise all sections of the site including the home, collection, product and basket pages. Working closely with The Drinks Drop operations team we ensured the user interface in and around their specific requirements were met with great and workable solutions. To give you a few examples, the provision of a bespoke custom age verification screen meaning the customer has to agree to being over 18 in the UK before browsing the website. The website also needed the customer to create their own bundle box of 6 different cocktails. The bundle interface featured custom styling to ensure a seamless experience and delivery of The Drinks Drop brand. Our in house team of developers allow constant monitoring of the Shopify platform to ensure everything works as it should. This has proved a great comfort and resource for The Drinks Drop team, and available to all of our clients.

The website is also fully responsive, adapting its content and layout to various screen sizes from large desktops, to mobile devices ensuring everyone, wherever and whatever they may be viewing us on to enjoy the website and experience.

Following on from the success of The Drinks Drop, we adapted the existing website to facilitate a partnership with London Cocktail Week. This year, London Cocktail Week would only be running online, but will trade a full month from 1st - 31st October. London Cocktail Week began in 2010 and is the biggest cocktail festival of its kind in the world. To date, the festival has welcomed hundreds of thousands of guests, inspired a new generation of Londoners to demand better drinking experiences and injected millions of pounds of revenue directly back into the London hospitality trade. On an international stage, the festival has become a blueprint for multiple Cocktail Weeks across the world and is universally recognised to be the best example of a cocktail festival globally.

Proceeds from each cocktail will be going directly back to the bar that created them. Plus, the bartenders on bikes, and those in the production kitchen are all out-of-work hospitality staff, so the campaign will be ensuring more people can stay in employment this autumn.

We raise a toast to all the teams involved and a big thank you to those who believed in the idea and its potential to live beyond lockdown. We wish you all the best!

If you have an e-commerce or online store project that you'd like to talk to one of our website team about, please send an email to begin@93ft.com and we'll be happy to help.

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