288 stockists mapped across 15 regions for Hani Soju

Hani Soju is a New Zealand drinks brand launching Korean-style flavoured soju in five flavours, stocked in bottle shops around the country. The brand arrived with a strong design concept already shaped by their creative team, and the brief was to turn it into a live website that carried the same energy on screen.

Two things made this more than a standard brand build. As an alcohol brand, the site needs an 18+ entry gate before anything else happens.

And because Hani sells through retailers rather than online, the most valuable thing the site can do is answer one question fast: where can I buy it near me.

We built the site on Astro and Tailwind and implemented the concept page by page, with a GSAP animation system that gives it the after-dark feel the brand wanted: a split-text hero, smooth scrolling, magnetic buttons, and a five-flavour bottle carousel where the background gradient shifts with each flavour. The 18+ age gate does real work here: it locks the page until a visitor confirms their age, and the hero animation only fires once the gate is dismissed.

The stockist finder puts 288 retail locations across 15 regions on an interactive map, with text search and a use-my-location option that sorts stores by distance. Behind it sits a re-runnable Python pipeline that reads the client's order spreadsheet and resolves every store's address and coordinates automatically, so the list stays current as new stockists come on board.

We finished with a full SEO layer, including structured data covering all five flavour variants and an llms. txt file so AI search tools describe the brand accurately, and after a round of client feedback we rebuilt the mobile hero as its own layout rather than a squeezed-down desktop.