AuraML

The Brief

Great Lakes weren't solving an existing problem when they came to Suplex. They were filling a gap they had noticed in their category. Most tequila brands sell a product. But honestly very few of them tell you anything worth remembering about where it came from or how it got into the bottle. Great Lakes believed that if someone understood the story, the craft, the barrel, the batch, they'd leave with something more than a purchase. They'd leave with a preference.

The brief was to build a portfolio website, not a shop, that could carry that belief. Something animated, exploratory, and deliberately different from the static grid layouts that most spirits brands default to using on their websites. The visual world was already there in the brand with all those agave fields, mountain terrain, compass marks, grid lines, Mexican illustrations, skulls, maps. Suplex's job was to bring all of it to life on screen in a way that made sense in totality.

The Solution

A Website That Moves

The first decision that shaped everything else was treating movement as a design principle rather than a finishing detail. Most websites animate things after the layout is built. Here, the animation was part of the brief from the start, and it shows in how the site actually behaves.

The hero drops you straight into the agave fields of Jalisco. Farmland, the place where the whole story begins. From there, the site moves and bottles rise as you scroll. The compass rotates and headings come in at angles that break the horizontal rhythm most websites rely on. Cards overlap as you move through the cocktail section rather than sitting in a static row waiting to be clicked. The effect throughout is of a website that feels alive rather than assembled, which is exactly what a brand built around craft and origin needed.

Layouts That Break the Grid

The layout decisions were deliberate in order to break free from the usual convention. Left and right movement through sections, images that arrive differently to how a standard grid would place them, product cards that swap as you swipe rather than opening into a new page. None of it is unconventional for its own sake. It's unconventional because Great Lakes is not trying to be another tequila brand with a dark background and a floating bottle. The layout signals that itself even before you've read a word on their website.

Telling the Product Story

The three expressions, Blanco, Reposado, and Anejo, are introduced through an animated timeline that shows what actually happens during the aging process. Blanco aged up to sixty days, clear and clean. Reposado between two months and a year, settling into a light amber. Anejo and Extra Anejo going beyond that, deepening in colour and character the longer they sit. Glasses on screen shift in shade as the timeline moves, so you see the colour change as you learn what creates it. It's educating the customer without sounding like a boring college lesson, which is honestly the harder thing to pull off.

The Barrel and Batches Page

This page existed as a practice before Suplex built it digitally. The tradition of tracking spirits by barrel series, the specific wood, the spirit previously aged in it, the year and the batch, goes back as far as whisky and wine making. Great Lakes was already doing it. What they didn't have was a way for the person holding the bottle to access that information easily.

The page Suplex built makes it accessible. Scan the QR code on the bottle and you land on a page that tells you exactly which barrel your tequila came from, whether it was a bourbon barrel, a whiskey barrel, or a chardonnay barrel, and what that means for the flavour you're tasting. A bourbon barrel series from January 2025 will taste different from a chardonnay barrel series from September 2025. The page makes that difference legible and gives people who want a specific experience somewhere to come back to when they want to find it again.

The Cocktails Section

The cocktails page follows the same movement logic as the rest of the site. Cards that overlap as you scroll rather than sitting in a grid. Recipes presented with the same visual attention as the product pages, because the way you drink something is part of the story of what it is. It gives the site a reason for return visits and extends the brand's voice beyond the production process into the experience of actually using the product.

Animated Process Storytelling

The production process section uses iconography in motion rather than static diagrams or written explanations. Each step in the making of the tequila arrives in sequence, agave extraction, cooking, fermentation, distillation, aging, so the user's attention moves through the process the way the spirit itself does. A short video and icon GIFs ties it together without pulling focus away from the rest of the page.

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