The New Zealand Whisky Collection
Rescued single malt from Dunedin, sold to the world.
VISIT THENZWHISKY.COM↗
The whisky is rescued stock, casks saved from a distillery that closed and bottled under their own name in Dunedin. That story is most of why someone buys a bottle, and the old site could not tell it and sell at the same time.
It could not, because it was two sites. An ageing WordPress install carried the history and the brand. A separate Shopify store took the money. Two systems, two looks, two checkouts, and any customer who crossed from one to the other could feel the seam.
Going headless closed it. Shopify still runs everything the business depends on, products, inventory, orders, payments, and the front end is a Hydrogen app rendered on Shopify’s Oxygen network. The commerce stays in a system the team already knows how to work. Everything the customer actually sees is built rather than themed.
Age verification without an app
Alcohol shipping rules and age gating are handled in the build rather than bolted on with a third-party app, so they behave the way the brand wants and cost nothing per month.
Cask detail on the product page
Each bottling carries its cask and bottling information as structured product content, because for a rescued single malt that detail is the sale.
Limited releases, handled properly
Small runs and one-off bottlings get a real release treatment instead of appearing and vanishing from a grid.
Editorial pages as real layouts
The story pages are designed layouts, not a blog template with the header swapped out.
Server-rendered on Oxygen
The storefront renders on Shopify’s own edge network, so the pages arrive fast wherever the customer is ordering from.
Push to GitHub, it deploys
Deployment is a git push. No staging shuffle, no plugin update that takes the shop down on a Tuesday.