Bols Digital Cocktail Experience

Amsterdam based Bols, is one of the most celebrated and best-loved liquor brands across the globe. It’s a staple on bar, restaurant and cocktail menus worldwide. Bols asked Story of AMS to elevate its brands – and make a new retail ecosystem that is faster, mobile-first and more interactive.

What we did

• User Experience Design
• Interface Design
• Responsive Web Development
• Content Production

Balance inspiration with clarity

Bols, founded in 1575 in Amsterdam, is one of the oldest liquor brands in the world. Until today, Bols has the widest variety of market-relevant spirits. While this is great it also presented a challenge. How can we create a compelling and intuitive user journey through all the flavours and recipes?

Scalable Solution

The solution we landed on needed to be scalable. Since Bols produces over 40 different flavours which can be used to mix more than 100 different cocktails. We created a digital design system that matched the look and feel of the Bols brand and guides customers on an intuitive journey through all flavours and recipes.

Optimized product pages

When it comes to presenting the product, every flavour has a separate page. On that page, drinkers can find a variety of things. Cocktail recipes for that specific flavour? Check. Video about the ingredients? Sure. Related recipes? Of course! All in all the solution was to create a single source where all that Bols has to offer lives and can be interacted with.

Future-proof technology framework

The platform is content-heavy with hundreds of liqueurs and cocktails. We created a flexible framework that could handle this while keeping the same page speed. At the same time, the framework also makes it easy for Bols to add new flavours and cocktails.

Unique design framework

Throughout the website, we added elegant motion design that exposes the product and ingredients while scrolling. To reduce manual labour and costs we created automated animations and transitions to create a consistent experience across all the pages.

QR Code integration

With a stronger focus on consumers, Bols added QR codes on their bottles. Each QR code is linked to the page that matches the bottle, where you can learn about a product’s ingredients, and the cocktails you can make with it.