Esther

Esther is rum for people who swear they don't like rum. Pirates, palm trees, sticky sweetness… the rum category has played on the same clichés for decades while tequila and gin quietly took the cultural high ground. Enter Esther: a premium single-origin Colombian rum founded by two mothers who are bringing rum back, one changed mind at a time. Built around duality, reflections, and a bright green cap you can spot across a bar, they gave the brand a magnetic personality and came to us to give it a digital presence.

As brand designers themselves, the founders brought a lot to the table — packaging, monospace type, art direction, an electric green, and a glorious insistence on being different. We wrote new rules as we designed, exploring the unexpected ways each element should behave on screen and extending the brand system to have its own internet aura.

We designed the site like graphic designers, not web designers. Every screen had to work as a poster on its own, no matter where you stopped scrolling. On scroll, the iconic green cap rides down the page with you, both a design element and the way to the buy button, and on the homepage it drops into a stream-of-consciousness treatise and parts it into two halves.

Esther hides things for people who look closely so the website experience does too. For those who step away and let the browser sit untouched for a minute, a lion appears and rolls over, revealing two blinking faces. The About page runs deep with poems, history, and odd little fragments most studios would beg to trim, set across three columns in brutalist triptych fashion that recompose the viewport every time you scroll.

Esther promises a story that’s always beginning and never ending, so we made the site keep its word — for those who navigate all three columns to the bottom, “Rum is Back" lines up across the screen and an unending scroll of behind-the-scenes photos unlocks below.

"We didn't want a website, we wanted the brand to come alive. Studio Freight got it immediately. They took everything we'd built for Esther, the weirdness, the duality, the green, and figured out how it should move, breathe, and surprise people on screen. They didn't decorate our identity, they extended it. The site converts like crazy and we keep selling out. It's unmistakably Esther, and we're obsessed." — Emunah Winer, Co-founder