Herman Story Wines
Herman Story Wines Website Redesign
We took Herman Story Wines—loud, unruly, and unapologetically original—online, translating the in-your-face tasting room experience into a wild, immersive digital ride. The result? An award-winning website that snagged Best in Show at the American Advertising Awards and damn near broke the mold.
- Brand Positioning
- Brand Strategy
- Creative Direction
- Branding
The Challenge
The Herman Story brand doesn’t whisper. It doesn’t follow the rules. It’s brash, brawny, and totally unwilling to blend in. So when they asked us to bring that energy to the web, we couldn’t look away—kind of like a flaming muscle car doing donuts in a field of Chardonnay.
Our Solution
Before we touched a pixel, we cracked open the soul of the brand. No templated wine speak, no polished Napa gloss. We built a strategy that made room for contradictions: grit meets polish, storytelling meets absurdity, punk rock meets Paso Robles. Only then did we design a user experience that walked the line between chaos and clarity—true to the Herman Story ethos, but sophisticated enough to reflect what’s in the bottle.
Big Wine. Big Personality.
These wines don’t tiptoe in—they stomp through the room and steal the spotlight. Each Herman Story bottle is its own beast, with a name, a mood, and a story to tell. So the website couldn’t just show wine; it had to feel like Herman Story—loud, fast, a little unhinged, and totally original.
Every page was treated like its own label: unique layouts, offbeat imagery, and copy that sounds more bar fight than wine tasting. And because their in-house creative team keeps the content fresh with bold new releases each spring and fall, we built a backend flexible enough to handle the madness—without losing the muscle.
Come for the wine, stay for the weird.
This isn’t just a website—it’s a rabbit hole. From the start, we knew the goal wasn’t just to sell wine—it was to build something people wanted to come back to. Like a great glass of a bold Paso Cab (corks are for quitters), it had to be bold, layered, and a little addictive.
So we hid treats. Lots of them.
Refresh a page? The photos change.
Check the wine ratings? Expect sarcasm, not sommelier speak.
Search for something you shouldn’t? You’ll likely find something—probably too much.
We baked in Easter eggs, obscure references, and layered language that rewards curiosity. The result is a site that begs to be explored, poked, and played with—just like the wines it’s built around.
HERMAN STORY WINES
“Thanks for all your hard work, [the awards] are a testimony to this site being so f***ing cool. Hiring the Five Acres team has been a pleasure. We came to them with big, unconsolidated dreams for a new website and they were able to actively listen, ask the right questions, and distill all of our many opinions into a truly beautiful site redesign. I was constantly impressed with their ability to stay on track, maintain organization (of us and the project at hand), and keep to the proposed schedule. Highly recommend.”
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