Wild Rock - The stuff us Kiwis are made of

'We don't (only) build websites for awesome Kiwi wines companies because of their great wine - it's because they're bold, hardworking and ambitious'

We initially, engaged with Craggy Range - one of NZ’s premier wineries based in Havelock North in the Hawke’s Bay wine region - around a new brand of their’s called Wild Rock. Everything about Craggy Range got us excited - their keenness to push the boundaries, Hawke’s Bay, the people, and of course...their quality wine!

Craggy Range’s ambition appealed to us from the get go. This was a new brand launching a new, really stylistically distinct brand from their widely known and highly regarded brand, Craggy Range - a relationship that they were keen to play down.

We got involved from very early brand style definition process with a Wellington design agency called Tardis. From there we took their brand styling and interpreted that into a visual layout for the website, working closely with the Craggy Range team who not only wanted visual brand experience, but a highly functional eCommerce website too.

We built wildrock.co.nz using a custom deployment of our content management system, along with custom eCommerce functionality. We worked really closely with Emmerse as a creative agency on the design side of the Wild Rock project. 

The large challenges we faced were the same ones most wine brands face online, where it’s hard to find a compelling reason for people to buy wine online if they don’t know the brand very well. So that was one of the struggles with Wild Rock but the brand experience for users online has been hugely successful.

We ended up building two versions of the site, one for an American audience and one for everybody else (New Zealand and international). The reason for that was that Wild Rock had separate online branding targeting The States, and that online sales are only available in New Zealand - users can only purchase Wild Rock online if they have a New Zealand address for a number of delivery and alcohol regulation reasons.

We work very actively with Wild Rock in an on-going basis to help them develop their brand voice online, while helping them define their social media activity where they’re hugely active within Facebook and Twitter.