Souček Whisky.
Souček Whisky is an independent whisky curator and distributor in Prague, hand-picking single-cask bottlings from craft Scottish bottlers. I conceived and built his e-shop as a fully custom Shopify store written in Liquid — the brand, the entire design system and every section designed from scratch by me, together with the marketing strategy behind the launch.
AI Disclosure
Some parts of these notes were clarified and refined using AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude to enhance clarity and readability. All ideas are my own, and I reviewed and edited all texts myself.
Skills
Tools
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Challenge
(01)
A curator with a world-class portfolio was selling through a generic WordPress template — no brand system, a clumsy purchase flow, and a stack that made every update a chore.
Lukáš built his reputation on taste: single-cask whiskies from craft Scottish bottlers (Finn Thomson, Chorlton, Living Souls), chosen with time, place and signature in mind. His old WordPress site told none of that story. The brief had three layers:
Premium positioning: limited, collector-grade bottlings were presented like commodity products, with no visual language to match their craft.
A store built from scratch: a fully custom Shopify e-shop written in Liquid — products, content, purchase flow and legal requirements such as age verification included — replacing the aging WordPress site.
A hard deadline: the launch was tied to a client tasting event, so scope had to be negotiated and managed tightly from the first meeting.
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Solution
(02)
A custom Shopify theme — Souček Maison — designed and built from scratch, on a brand system of cream, deep forest green and a restrained touch of gold that I created for the maison.
Instead of bending a purchased template, I designed and built a bespoke theme ("Souček Maison") section by section:
Brand system first: cream and deep forest green cover over 90 % of every screen, with gold capped at 5 % of the surface — a rule written directly into the brand book. Typography pairs Lora with Instrument Serif italics and JetBrains Mono for labels and prices.
A signature hero: a mossy Scottish mountain rises into the cream canvas, followed by a staggered reveal of the curated selection. All motion is pure CSS with full prefers-reduced-motion support — no animation libraries. The animated tile of this very case study is a replica of that hero.
Custom Liquid sections: hero, curated selection, whisky houses, tastings, story and contact — all configurable Shopify sections, so the client can edit content without touching code.
Quality gates: a Playwright test suite and structured release audits (age-gate, empty states, responsive passes across breakpoints) before deploys.
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Conclusion
(03)
The result is an e-shop that sells the way Lukáš curates: quietly confident, warm and precise — a maison, not a marketplace.
What this project demonstrates:
✅ End-to-end ownership: strategy, brand identity, UX, theme development, testing and launch coordination carried as one continuous thread.
✅ Craft in the details: a strict colour budget, typographic hierarchy and CSS-only motion design carry the premium feel without a single heavy dependency.
✅ Business alignment: the redesign was scoped together with a marketing strategy (tastings programme, content and social media), so the web is one part of a larger growth system rather than an isolated artefact.
Visit the live project at soucekwhisky.cz.
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