Monkey Shoulder built its name on being the whisky that doesn't take itself too seriously. Made for mixing, loved by bartenders, and loud in all the right places.

In 2026, William Grant & Sons set out to take the brand somewhere new. The strategy shifted Monkey Shoulder from high energy to elevated energy, speaking to 25 to 35 year old urban professionals who care about quality and want brands that signal good taste. A new brand identity followed, with a sharper focus on the liquid and its Speyside provenance.

We've been Monkey Shoulder's digital partner since 2023, when we designed and built their global website. For the relaunch, they asked us to make the site the flagship expression of the new identity, live in every market on the day the brand relaunched.

The website we launched in 2023 was built to capture the brand's energy. The new strategy asked for something more refined, without losing the personality that made people fall for Monkey Shoulder in the first place.

The new site also needed to do more. New pages would tell the Speyside story, give Studio Monkey Shoulder's creative partnerships a proper home, and let the brand team spin up campaign pages on demand.

And there was no room to slip. The site was tied directly to the global brand relaunch, every page had to be live on day one, and the old identity couldn't appear anywhere once the new one launched. All of this had to happen in under four months, across 15 live locales.

Most drinks websites stop at the bottle. Monkey Shoulder Selects goes a step further, pointing people to the bars where the brand comes to life.

Selects is Monkey Shoulder's curated guide to MOSH Hi-Fi bars: venues chosen for their music, atmosphere and drinks, all in the spirit of the brand. The City Guide gives the programme a home on the site, so visitors can explore participating bars city by city and plan their next night out.

We designed it as a single, reusable template built around an interactive map. Switch cities and the map and bar list update together. Scroll through the list and each bar's pin is highlighted and centred on the map; tap a pin and the page jumps to that bar. Visitors can pan and zoom freely to find what's near them. Adding a new city is a job for the brand team in the CMS, so the guide can grow as the programme rolls out to new markets. A signposting module elsewhere on the site draws visitors through to it.

The City Guide was also the first part of monkeyshoulder.com to launch in the new brand identity, months ahead of the full relaunch. That gave us a live test of the new look in a real context before rolling it out across the whole site, and in the redesign we refined it further using [real-world testing and usage data from launch].

It turns the website from a place to read about Monkey Shoulder into a reason to go out and drink it, and gives the brand a direct link between its digital presence and the bars that champion it.

When a brand moves upmarket, the risk is that it loses what made people love it. Premium can easily tip into generic.

The answer is to hold on to the personality and raise the craft around it. A clear design system, a story told with more confidence, features that give people a reason to come back, and delivery planned tightly enough that a global relaunch lands on the same day everywhere.

That's what we built for Monkey Shoulder. If you're facing something similar, we'd love to hear about it.