The Curious Drinker
The Curious Drinker
Formerly Craft Gin Club - now your guide to the wonderful world of quality spirits.
About The
Curious Drinker
Craft Gin Club had built a loyal following as one of the UK’s leading drinks subscription services – a multi-faceted brand operating across subscription box delivery, direct retail, and a rich editorial platform dedicated to the world of gin and spirits.
As the business evolved beyond its gin-club roots into a broader drinks and lifestyle brand, a full rebrand to The Curious Drinker became the natural next step – one that required not just a new visual identity, but a carefully engineered digital transformation to match.
Bitcube had been the technical partner throughout this journey, and was tasked with delivering the rebrand in a way that was seamless for the business, risk-free for its subscribers, and built to support the brand’s ambitions going forward.
The Challange
A rebrand of this scale presented several interconnected challenges that had to be addressed in parallel:
- Legacy theme architecture: The existing Shopify theme lacked the flexibility and tooling required to support a risk-free brand migration. Attempting a rebrand directly on the old codebase would have been brittle and difficult to test in isolation.
- Subscriber continuity: With an active subscription base, the business needed to remain fully operational right up to the moment of launch. Any disruption to the customer experience – particularly for subscribers – was not an option.
- Overly complex customer portal: The bespoke subscription management portal had grown to do too much – much of it functionality that customers didn’t actually value. This bloat made the platform harder to maintain and created noise that detracted from the experience. It needed a full visual overhaul to align with the new brand, but also a deliberate simplification to refocus it on what mattered.
- Fragmented content: The brand’s editorial blog content lived on a separate standalone application, disconnected from the main storefront. This created a missed opportunity to drive product discovery from content, and added operational overhead for the team.
- SEO risk: A domain and brand transition carries inherent SEO risk. Protecting the organic search equity built under the Craft Gin Club brand was a key requirement throughout the migration.
Our Solution
Bitcube approached this project in deliberate phases – building the foundations early, de-risking the transition, and executing a clean cutover on launch day.
Phase 1: Foundation – Modern Theme Migration
The first stage of the engagement was migrating Craft Gin Club from its legacy Shopify theme to a modern, block-based Shopify theme architecture. This wasn’t cosmetic – it was strategic groundwork. The modernised theme was published and ran live under the Craft Gin Club brand for six months, giving the team a stable, flexible foundation while an unpublished version was quietly being shaped in parallel to represent The Curious Drinker.
Phase 2: Rebrand Build – Parallel Theme Development
With the new theme in place, Bitcube created a duplicate of the storefront as the canvas for The Curious Drinker brand. The team produced designs that brought the new brand’s visual identity to life – translating the brand guidelines into a considered on-site experience – before building out those designs in the theme, extending it further with features and layout patterns that reflected the direction of the new brand.
Critically, this work happened entirely in parallel. The live Craft Gin Club site continued to operate without interruption, while the new brand experience was designed, built, refined, and signed off in the background.
Phase 3: Launch Day Cutover
The migration was executed as a single, coordinated cutover: domain switched, new theme published, and all updated services connected. The result was a clean, zero-downtime launch – the business went to bed as Craft Gin Club and woke up as The Curious Drinker.
Customer Portal Redesign & Simplification
Alongside the storefront migration, Bitcube undertook a significant overhaul of the bespoke customer portal that powers the subscription experience. The portal was restyled in full to align with the new brand, and – crucially – legacy code that was no longer serving a purpose was identified and removed. The result was a 60% reduction in total application volume, producing a lighter, faster, and more maintainable platform.
Blog Content Consolidation
The Curious Drinker’s editorial content had previously lived on a standalone application, separate from the main Shopify storefront. Bitcube migrated this blog content directly into the Shopify ecosystem, unifying the brand’s content and commerce under a single platform. This positions the editorial content as a genuine sales channel, allowing the team to surface relevant products from within articles and drive more effective conversion from content.
SEO Protection
Throughout the migration, Bitcube implemented redirect strategies and technical SEO measures to preserve the organic search value built up under the Craft Gin Club brand. The transition was managed to minimise ranking disruption and protect the brand’s hard-earned search visibility during the changeover.
CRO Foundation - Onboarding & Acquisition
Ahead of the rebrand, we addressed existing challenges with Craft Gin Club’s online customer journey, allowing us to analyse the true effect of the rebrand on customer behaviour. Beyond the rebrand itself, Bitcube began laying the groundwork for a more streamlined on-site acquisition experience. A new onboarding journey is in development – one designed to lean into the “Curious” spirit of the brand, guiding new visitors through a more engaging, discovery-led path to subscription and purchase.
Key Features of the Project:
- Phased theme migration – from legacy to modern Shopify architecture as the rebrand foundation
- Parallel brand build – zero impact on live operations throughout development
- Zero-downtime launch day cutover
- Full customer portal redesign with 60% codebase reduction
- Blog content migration from standalone app into Shopify
- SEO protection strategy throughout the brand transition
- CRO foundation – new onboarding and acquisition experience in development
Client Overview
- Client: The Curious Drinker (formerly Craft Gin Club)
- Location: London, United Kingdom
- Industry: Drinks & Lifestyle - Subscription, Online Retail & Editorial
Discover
- UX/UI Design
- Shopify Theme Development
- eCommerce Solutions
Tech
- Shopify Liquid
- Shopify Sections & Blocks
- Bespoke Customer Portal
- HTML
- CSS
In the Media
The Results
The migration from Craft Gin Club to The Curious Drinker was delivered on schedule, on brand, and without disruption to the business or its subscribers.
Key outcomes included:
- Zero downtime on launch day: The brand transition was executed as a seamless cutover, with no interruption to trading or the subscriber experience.
- 60% reduction in portal codebase: The customer portal emerged leaner and more maintainable, with legacy complexity removed and the visual identity fully refreshed.
- SEO continuity: Organic search value was protected through the transition, with no significant ranking disruption attributed to the rebrand.
- Unified content and commerce: Blog content previously siloed on a separate platform is now integrated directly into the Shopify storefront, creating a stronger content-to-product journey.
- A platform built for what’s next: The new theme architecture, consolidated codebase, and CRO foundations give The Curious Drinker the technical platform to grow – not just to rebrand.
What could have been a high-risk, high-disruption project was delivered as a methodical, well-sequenced transformation – a reflection of the long-standing partnership between Bitcube and The Curious Drinker team.
Client Testimonial
“We have worked with Bitcube for 4 years, and continue to be impressed by their capability, customer service and strong work ethic.”
“A few things that stand out for me are their efforts to understand our business and their appreciation that customer experience has a massive impact in our operation.
Another one is their technical capability in that they can actually do the incredible things that they promise, which sounds simple, but very rarely is. At the start I thought ‘if this system does what these guys say it’s going, it will be phenomenal.’ And although I didn’t believe them at the start, it has done everything and more than they promised!
Bitcube has built a fantastic team of developers, and we will no doubt be continuing our relationship with Bitcube into the future. As we are UK based, when starting the project our biggest concern was about working remotely. However, this concern proved to be unfounded – collaboration and communication has been fantastic. When needed, we have been able to have daily calls and numerous screen-share sessions and we have also been able to catch up during their visits to London and my visits to their offices.”
Bruce Casalis
Founder & Managing Director