The Curious Drinker

About The Curious Drinker

Craft Gin Club had built a loyal following as a well-established UK drinks subscription service — 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 Challenge

A rebrand of this scale presented several interconnected challenges that had to be addressed in parallel. 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. With an active subscription base, the business needed to remain fully operational right up to the moment of launch. The bespoke subscription management portal had grown to do too much, with functionality customers didn't actually value, making it harder to maintain and creating noise that detracted from the experience. The brand's editorial blog content lived on a separate standalone application, disconnected from the main storefront, creating a missed opportunity to drive product discovery from content. Finally, 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.\n\nPhase 1: Foundation — Modern Theme Migration. The first stage 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and ran live under the Craft Gin Club brand for six months, giving the team a stable, flexible foundation while an unpublished version was quietly being shaped in parallel to represent The Curious Drinker.\n\nPhase 2: Rebrand Build — Parallel Theme Development.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. 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.\n\nPhase 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.\n\nAlongside 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 legacy code that was no longer serving a purpose was identified and removed — resulting in a 60% reduction in total application volume. Bitcube also migrated the brand's editorial blog content directly into the Shopify ecosystem, unifying content and commerce under a single platform. 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.

Key Features

• ✓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