A brand with personality. A platform with one too.
Dogfish Head isn’t just a beer brand: it’s a brewery, distillery, restaurant, brewpub, inn, events and merch, and the whole point is that it feels distinct. As a user experience designer at Verndale, I worked on its Sitecore XM Cloud migration, one site for all of it without losing what makes them them.
live site → dogfish.com
goal
The brand is warm, weird and specific, and the old site was polished but generic. The harder problem was scope. One site had to carry the brewery, the distillery, the restaurant, the brewpub, the inn, tours, events and merch, and serve as a foundation for other Boston Beer Company brands.
System overview: hero, events, cocktails and brand expression.
what we did
I framed it as four sites under one umbrella and made a deliberate simplification call: don’t reinvent restaurant reservations, event RSVPs or inn booking, which people already know how to use, and spend the design energy on the surfaces that make the brand the brand. The result is nineteen templates and eleven product themes. The research gave the IA its rule: why beats how beats what.
one platform, four lines of business
Most beer brand sites are catalogs with a contact page. This one supports restaurants, a brewpub, the inn, tours, events and the shop. One template family carries all of it, with distinct brand codes per surface.
Visit, a gateway to four coastal properties, and weddings and events.
The product family: one system across every beer style.
Small-batch whiskey storytelling, and a brand partnership as a design moment.
warm and weird, structured and scalable
The temptation in a project this big is to choose: lean into the brand’s eccentricity and lose the system, or build something clean and scalable and lose the brand. The work was refusing that choice.
Product masthead: the brand in motion.
two audiences, one IA
Regional fans want activation: events, hospitality and drops. National fans want engagement: stories, articles and the Fish Finder, the named beer locator that doubles as brand expression. Same nav, different jobs.
naming the navigation
Navigation naming is IA strategy made visible. Six naming frameworks were tested against findability and brand fidelity, and the winner was mostly plain nouns with brand voice only where it earned its place. The Drinks menu grew from a beer-only list into a two-panel mega menu, so spirits and cocktails get room too.
explore the architecture
The full information architecture is interactive. Move through the sections and see how the lines of business fit together.
result
19
page templates designed across desktop and mobile.
11
product page color themes for line-of-business variation.
1
live platform at dogfish.com, built to be a foundation for other Boston Beer brands.
