About Bandolier Brewing
Bandolier Brewing is a small family owned brewery in Warragul, Victoria. They’re a busy bunch with a small team producing great beer and running a busy bar. They are also found in a number of bars and bottle shops throughout Gippsland and Victoria.
The Challenge
Bandolier Brewing are a small company run by a husband and wife, along with their small team. They spend most of their time brewing beer, running their bar, and supplying beer to other bars and bottle shops. They don’t have time to think about their website or digital marketing efforts.
When we first met with Bandolier Brewing, they had a simple free website with Square. They admitted it wasn’t a great site and were really only using it so people could see their opening hours, and maybe order beer click and collect. They wanted their beer brand and their bar to look cool and inviting, and felt that having a professional website would help with that.
The Solution
Bandolier Brewing wanted a clean looking website that encouraged people to come to their venue as well as seek our their beer at bottle shops and other bars. Their vision wasn’t over complicated, but they wanted something cool.
How we worked with Bandolier Brewing:
- A full website rebuild on WordPress: we were moving from a free Square site to WordPress. The site needed to have ecommerce functionality that would talk to their bar POS system. We also worked with an external graphic designer based in Mexico (who the brewery use for their labels) to create graphics inline with their current brand assets.
- Copywriting and editing: there wasn’t a lot of copy on their old website, so we had to create new content. This was based on existing descriptions of their beers and a few taste tests!
- Audit and clean up of online presence: Bandolier Brewing had a great Facebook and Instagram presence, but they weren’t taking advantage of of services like Google My Business to help advertise their business. We went through everything and cleaned it up.
- Website hosting: as they were moving off of their free site, Bandolier Brewing needed fast and reliable website hosting. Downtime is always a risk when you move servers so we decided to do the move on a Monday night when the bar was closed anyway and they wouldn’t be receiving emails.
The Outcome
We’ll be honest, this was one of our favourite projects. Working with the team at Bandolier Brewing and their existing graphic designer in Mexico was a delight. This was a true team effort from initial concepting to final product.
The ecommerce features of the site integrate with their bar POS to make accounting and stock control easy. The website requires virtually no maintenance, and it’s enjoyed by all.
We ended up over planning moving the site to the new server. We planned for the worst, just in case, but the site only ended up being down for about 30 minutes. Email was working right away.
