Yéyo Tequila · Digital Commerce Rebuild
Rebuilding the digital side of a brand I've spent 15+ years building.
Yéyo had evolved significantly. The website hadn't kept pace.
Products, limited releases, barrel programs, retail expansion, distillery stories and years of brand history had accumulated across the business.
The goal wasn't to make the website prettier. It was to build a digital platform that could better support where the business was going.
- Role
- Founder / Digital & E-commerce Lead
- Scope
- Strategy → UX → Commerce → Content → Technology → Launch
- Platform
- Shopify + Custom Front End
- Status
- Live · Continuing to Evolve
The brand had outgrown the website.
Yéyo wasn't the same business it had been when the previous site was built.
The product portfolio had expanded. Limited releases had become a larger part of the business. The barrel program had years of history behind it. Retail distribution continued to grow. The distillery had stories customers had never seen. And the website needed to work harder across both DTC and retail.
The challenge wasn't simply redesigning pages. It was figuring out how all of those pieces should work together as one digital system.
- 01Product Discovery
- 02Brand Storytelling
- 03DTC Commerce
- 04Retail Discovery
- 05Limited Releases
- 06Content Architecture
- 07Search + AI Discovery
- 08Mobile Experience
Build the system, not just the pages.
I approached the rebuild as a digital ecosystem rather than a traditional website redesign. Every major area needed a clear job.
Commerce needed to convert. Storytelling needed to build the brand. The Barrel Room needed to organize years of experimentation. Limited Editions needed to support launches and scarcity. Find Us needed to connect digital traffic with physical retail. Playa Yéyo needed to extend the brand beyond the bottle.
And the underlying content needed to be structured so traditional search engines and emerging AI answer engines could understand Yéyo.
- Brand
- Content
- Commerce
- Retail
- Search / AI
- Customer
Strategy through execution.
This wasn't a project where I wrote a brief and handed it off.
I worked across the strategy and the execution, moving between business decisions, customer experience, content, commerce and technical implementation.
Strategy
- Digital strategy
- Information architecture
- Customer journeys
- Commerce strategy
- Prioritization
UX + Front End
- UX/UI
- Responsive design
- Navigation
- Product discovery
- Merchandising
- Mobile experience
Back End + Commerce
- Shopify architecture
- Product/catalog structure
- Checkout routing
- Shipping logic
- Forms
- Integrations
- Custom functionality
Content
- Brand storytelling
- Product education
- Barrel history
- Limited releases
- Cocktails
- Food
- Distillery content
Discovery
- SEO
- AEO
- Structured data
- Entity architecture
- Internal linking
- Canonical cleanup
- Google Search Console
Launch + Optimization
- QA
- Mobile testing
- Analytics
- Conversion thinking
- Iteration
- Ongoing optimization
More than a redesign.
The rebuild touched far more than the visual layer — including commerce architecture, custom functionality, content structure, search visibility and the systems behind the customer experience.
- Lines of code across the rebuild
- 40,000+Lines of code across the rebuild
- States served online
- 46States served online
- Of brand history organized
- 15+ YearsOf brand history organized
- Strategy through execution
- End-to-EndStrategy through execution
Different pages. Different jobs. One system.
Digital Foundation · Home Page
Connected brand storytelling, product discovery, commerce and Yéyo's physical retail presence within one digital experience.
Retail + Digital · Find Us
A custom location experience — city/ZIP search, geolocation and map-based discovery — connecting online discovery with Yéyo's growing retail and on-premise footprint.
Content Architecture · Barrel Room
Turned years of barrel experimentation and product history into structured evergreen content designed for customers, search engines and AI answer engines.
Brand Experience · Playa Yéyo
Extended Yéyo beyond product pages with an editorial experience built around cocktails, food and the broader brand lifestyle.
Product Launch · Alexander
A dedicated experience for a limited Añejo release combining product education, scarcity, email capture and release storytelling.
Campaign Experience · Agave Vice
A visually distinct campaign environment inside the same underlying commerce ecosystem.
Brand Storytelling · Story
Organized more than 15 years of founder, distillery and brand history into a deeper digital story.
What customers see — and what makes it work.
Front End
- Responsive experience
- Navigation
- Product discovery
- PDPs
- Collections
- Limited releases
- Content experiences
- Store locator UX
- Mobile optimization
Back End
- Shopify commerce
- Catalog architecture
- Checkout routing
- Shipping logic
- Forms
- Location data
- Integrations
- Structured data
- Analytics
- Technical QA
The goal was never technology for technology's sake. Every system needed to support a better customer experience or a real business need.
Built for search. And what comes after search.
Traditional SEO was only part of the rebuild.
I also restructured major parts of the site around how answer engines and AI systems understand brands, products, people, places and relationships.
AEO — Answer Engine Optimization — helps make brand information easier for AI-powered search and answer systems to understand and surface accurately.
Work included
- Structured data
- Entity relationships
- Answer-first content
- Internal knowledge architecture
- Canonical cleanup
- Product facts
- FAQ architecture
- Authority pages
- Internal linking
- Google Search Console
Launch. Learn. Keep building.
I've launched enough websites to know they're never really finished.
You can keep tweaking copy, changing layouts and finding one more thing to fix forever. At some point you have to launch, watch how people actually use it and keep making it better.
That's how I'm approaching Yéyo. The new site is live. And I already have a list of things I want to change.
A good digital platform should keep evolving with the business.
Strategy is more useful when you can execute it.
My role isn't to come in, create a deck and disappear.
I work with companies at the point where strategy and execution meet — figuring out what needs to happen, prioritizing it, and helping get the work across the finish line.
Need senior e-commerce leadership without another full-time executive?
I work with a small number of companies on a fractional basis, typically 8–10 hours per week.