Context
Wild Peach Schnapps is a DBG brand. The site is a brand site — there is no cart — and its job is to make the product look like something you would put on a table, and to give people a reason to buy a bottle: cocktails they can actually make.
The problem
Alcohol marketing in South Africa requires age verification before content. That requirement lands squarely on the most valuable two seconds the site has.
Most implementations handle this badly. They interrupt on every page load, they forget the answer, they block search engines from the content behind them, or they are a plugin’s default modal dropped over a designed page with no regard for how it looks.
The second problem was structural: cocktail recipes are the reason anyone shares a drinks site, and they are usually buried in one long scrolling page where none of them can be linked to.
What I did
The age gate was built as part of the design rather than dropped on top of it — brand-styled, one decision, and remembered, so a returning visitor is not asked again. It gates the experience without gating what search engines and social previews need to see.
Each cocktail became its own page with its own image, ingredients and method. That means every recipe is a shareable link, a pinnable image and a search result in its own right, instead of an anchor tag in a page nobody can link into.
The #LifeIsPeachy campaign identity carried through the whole build rather than sitting on the homepage as a banner.
The result
Compliance handled properly, once, without spending the site’s first impression on a grey modal.
Six cocktails that each work as their own entry point — which for a brand with no cart is the entire distribution strategy.
