Hugh Hamilton Wines:
A home online for the black sheep of Australian wine
Problem
Hugh Hamilton Wines sells only direct, by choice: no bottle shops, no retail chains, just the cellar door, the website and the Black Sheep Club. The club and the brand’s social following had kept growing while the website fell behind. It was slow, it crashed, its pages were hard to update and hard to find your way around, and club members couldn’t change their own details, so they called the office instead. With the move to Commerce7 already decided, Hugh Hamilton needed a site equal to its ambition: to be the best direct-to-consumer wine brand in Australia.
Background
The Hamilton family has not missed a vintage since 1837. Hugh is its black sheep: he left the family business to start his own, and his daughter Mary now runs it, the first woman to do so. The Black Sheep Club, started more than 20 years ago, was early to wine clubs in Australia, and it runs on behind-the-scenes events, first access to new releases and members-only wines. The brief asked for premium and modern with a Black Sheep twist: fun, quirky, and full of people.
Solution
We started with how customers actually used the old site, reading heatmaps and reviewing local search, the Google Business Profile and citations. From there we developed brand guidelines for the web and designed and built the site on Commerce7.
Club, collection and product pages took center stage, designed to showcase Hugh Hamilton as a non-stuffy lifestyle brand for the modern Aussie wine lover.
A page for every character
Every Hugh Hamilton wine is a character, from The Drama Queen to The Villain, and each one has a page to match its name. Product pages answer customers’ most common questions: how was it made, what does it taste like, and how do I pair it with dinner. Below them sit a video tasting note, the technical details and the food photography. A banner tells club members what they save on today’s order and invites everyone else to join.
Before and after
Project details
Client
Hugh Hamilton Wines
Region
Website