3 Howls Distillery

Project Description

Local Feel, National Presence

Clean lines, a black-and-gold palette, and easy navigation make for a website you can really sink your teeth into.

Design Inspiration

Located in Seattle’s industrial SoDo neighborhood, the team at 3 Howls takes pride in staying true to their local roots as they expand nationwide. When they came to us looking for a website redesign, founder Will Maschmeier expressed the need to strike a balance between the local and national, leveraging the distillery’s unique Pacific Northwest roots while also appealing to a much larger audience.

In addition to dually communicating the distillery’s local feel and national presence, our design team prioritized showcasing the character of the product, the bottles, and the 3 Howls team. 3 Howls' new site design features a dark palette with gold accents to match the sleek and edgy feeling of the brand. The matte colors and abstract strokes give the site an arcane vibe that expertly avoids coming off as “too Halloween,” all while reflecting the sophistication of the brand.

Development Successes

Given the alcohol-related content of the 3 Howls site, our developers built in an age-verification security check which opens upon users navigating to the homepage. This not only keeps the site in compliance with legal standards, it looks splashy while doing so.

3 Howls also features a custom location finder in the “Where to Buy” section. This allows visitors to find their favorite 3 Howls Distillery products at a store convenient to them—a critical feature as 3 Howls expands their distribution network.

Finally, 3 Howls makes use of highly editable categorization in multiple areas of their site to bring content to users in the cleanest, easiest-to-use manner possible. Operating on efelle’s proprietary FusionCMS, the 3 Howls catalog is filterable and accessible from both the catalog overview page and the main navigation. 3 Howls also show off some bartender flair in their “Featured Drinks” section. With categorization functioning in a similar way to the catalog, the Drinks section is both fun to navigate and beautiful to look at. As an added bonus, the efelle team built the CMS so that the 3 Howls team can pull featured drink posts into catalog product pages with only a few clicks.

Cheers!