Jaywalk Whiskey
Jaywalk Whiskey
Overview
- Responsive microsite
- Store locator
- Photography direction
What We Did
The Outcome
The Premise
Create an informative microsite for a new whiskey brand that communicates story, product, and craft through a simple but bold digital experience.
New York Distilling Co. was founded by Allen Katz and Tom Potter in Brooklyn, Potter had already co-founded Brooklyn Brewery, and Katz brought decades in the spirits world. They started distilling rye in a Bushwick warehouse, ran a bar called The Shanty next door, and built a reputation making grain-to-glass whiskey before most craft distillers were filling their first barrel. Their earlier expression, Ragtime Rye, laid the groundwork. Jaywalk was the next generation, including an Heirloom expression made from an extinct New York rye varietal they revived.
Kingsland, a Brooklyn brand agency, had just finished the Jaywalk identity, wordmark, bottle design, type system, color palette. The production run was already moving. Retailers had orders in, and the line was expanding nationally and globally. But the brand had no web presence to point anyone to.
We were brought on to lead the web design, working alongside Kingsland’s developer who handled the build. The brief: translate Kingsland’s brand identity into a focused microsite that could ship alongside the bottles.
What we walked into
Therum was the design partner responsible for art direction, layout design, and digital presentation for Jaywalk Whiskey’s launch website.
The starting state was a brand kit and a deadline. No CMS, no hosting, no wireframes, no copy deck. Kingsland had finished the identity round and handed off assets. NYDC had inventory headed to shelves. The microsite existed in everyone’s head and nowhere on a server.
The brief was tight: don’t redesign the brand, extend it. Build a focused microsite around the three SKUs, the distillery story, and a way to find a bottle nearby. No e-commerce, Jaywalk moves through retailers, not direct-to-consumer.
existing Jaywalk web presence
Straight, Bonded, Heirloom
Home, About, Whiskeys, Distillery, Find
age gate, required before the site loads
The Approach
We designed a visually expressive microsite that highlights the bottle, its story, and its process. The interface focuses on clean hierarchy, strong photography, and bold typography that mirrors the brand’s confidence.
Lead with the bottle on every surface. That was the rule. Editorial layout, one image per section, copy in the negative space, no carousels. Every page puts the product front and center, then gets out of the way.
Because the product moves through retailers, the microsite’s job is desire and direction, not transaction.
The age gate loads before anything else, a legal requirement for spirits. It needed to feel like part of the site, not a speed bump bolted onto the front door.
Wires First
We delivered a responsive microsite featuring brand imagery, product breakdowns, and limited edition release information. Key sections include whiskey details and tasting notes.
Before any bottle photography landed in a comp, we tested the structure as low-fidelity wires. The point was to lock the anatomy (where the bottle sits, where the spec table goes, how the locator behaves) before the brand layer made everything look correct by default.
Three of the page anatomies as wires, Home, the SKU flight, and the locator. The rest of the surfaces inherit the same primitives: full-bleed hero, copy block, action.
The brand. Brash, unabashedly NYC. The brand identity is by Kingsland, a Brooklyn brand agency. Their approach pulled from vintage typography, ghost signs, and New York subway wayfinding, the visual language of the city Jaywalk comes from. The custom Central Avenue typeface anchors the system. The whole identity is brash, unabashedly NYC, and built on pre-Prohibition history: New York as the rye whiskey capital of the country before the government shut the stills down. Kingsland’s philosophy for the brand was to break the small, stupid rules to never stop moving, fitting, given the name. They designed the wordmark, the bottle, the type system, the palette. What follows is what we built from. Brand identity by Kingsland . What we extended on the web side: type lock for the screen, layout grids tuned to the bottle’s proportions, motion treatment on page transitions, photography direction for the SKU and lifestyle shots, microcopy tone. The point was to keep the brand intact and make the site feel like a continuation of it, not a separate thing built by a separate team.
The product. Built to hold the bottle. The entire site orbits one object. Every layout decision, every scroll trigger, every transition, all of it was built to hold the bottle. Three SKUs, three visual registers: lifestyle against the skyline, studio isolation on color, and editorial on raw concrete. Straight on the skyline. Bonded in the studio. Straight on concrete. Same bottle, different registers, all directed to anchor the site’s editorial layout.
The site. Five Pages, One Object. Five surfaces, one continuous voice. Home does the introduction, bottle over a desaturated NYC street, the wordmark floating. About gives the rye its origin in time and place. Whiskeys lays out all three SKUs as a single horizontal flight, each with tasting notes, proof, and provenance. Distillery puts faces and warehouse floors to the process. Find sends the visitor to the nearest shelf with a map-driven locator.
The distillery. Born in Brooklyn. Jaywalk isn’t made in a co-packing facility upstate. It’s distilled in a warehouse in Bushwick, steps from the bar where the first batches were poured. The brand lives on the building. The distillery in Bushwick. The brand is on the wall and in the grain.
What Shipped
The microsite established a clear, cohesive digital home for Jaywalk Whiskey, balancing storytelling and usability while presenting the product with clarity and visual depth.
A five-page microsite designed and built from a brand kit and a deadline. The wireframes locked the anatomy. The brand layer made it feel like Kingsland’s identity had always been a website. The product photography put the bottle where it belonged, front and center on every surface.
Jaywalk shipped aligned to the production roll-out and has been live at jaywalkrye.com since launch. The site drove retail discovery through the store locator, gave the brand its first digital home, and held the line Kingsland drew, without redesigning a single element of their identity.
Clarity, structure, and visual precision
The microsite lives at jaywalkrye.com.
This project reflects Therum’s focus on clarity, structure, and visual precision. By keeping design intentional and information direct, we built an experience that communicates value without excess.
- ForbesWhiskey Of The Week: Jaywalk Bonded Rye
- Robb ReportTaste Test: Jaywalk’s New Rye Is One of the Best Grain-to-Glass Whiskeys Around
- The Brand IdentityKingsland bottles NYC’s rich spirit and typographic history in their identity for rye brand Jaywalk
- The Spirits BusinessNew York Distilling Co debuts Jaywalk