Pendleton Whiskey
CLIENT
Experience Interaction
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, PHP, React
YEAR
2018
EXTERNAL URL
The second spirits brand I built for Experience Interaction — following the Wolf Moon Bourbon launch. Full-stack WordPress development for Pendleton Whisky during a $205M acquisition by Proximo Spirits, with structured content architecture, age-gated entry, and campaign-modular pages supporting a heritage brand going national.
Development lead, working alongside Experience Interaction.
Background
A heritage spirits brand needed a digital platform that could survive an ownership change.
Pendleton Whisky — Oregon’s flagship whisky brand, produced by Hood River Distillers since 2003 and synonymous with the Pendleton Round-Up rodeo — was in the middle of a $205 million acquisition by Becle (parent company of Jose Cuervo) through its U.S. subsidiary Proximo Spirits. Moving 250,000+ nine-liter cases annually, primarily west of the Mississippi, the brand was about to go national under new ownership. Experience Interaction, already Proximo’s digital agency of record, brought me back after the Wolf Moon Bourbon launch to rebuild Pendleton’s web presence ahead of the ownership transition.
The platform needed to serve two masters — maintain continuity for existing brand equity while providing the infrastructure for Proximo’s expanded marketing ambitions post-acquisition.
Implementation
Event-driven content architecture built for campaign velocity and regulatory compliance.
Where Wolf Moon had been a clean product launch site, Pendleton demanded a deeper content architecture. The WordPress build used Advanced Custom Fields to structure content across product lines, brand history, cocktail recipes, and event sponsorship pages — including dedicated sections for the Pendleton Round-Up and regional rodeo partnerships. The same age verification gate handled TTB compliance. What set this build apart was its campaign modularity: new product launches, seasonal promotions, and sponsorship activations could each be spun up as self-contained landing pages without touching the core site. The frontend delivered responsive layouts with lazy-loaded media, tuned for the mobile-heavy traffic patterns typical of event-driven spirits audiences.
The structured field architecture kept content organized across five distinct content types — critical for a heritage brand managing both legacy narrative and active product promotion during an acquisition.
Results
Seamless ownership transition, zero platform interruption.
The platform launched ahead of the acquisition close, providing Proximo Spirits with an operational digital presence from day one of ownership. The structured content layer proved its value immediately — Proximo’s marketing team managed the transition from Hood River Distillers branding to the new ownership identity entirely through the CMS, with no development support required. The campaign-modular architecture handled its first real test when the brand activated sponsorship pages for the 2018 Pendleton Round-Up season, deployed by the client team without a single developer ticket.
Together with the Wolf Moon Bourbon site that preceded it, the Pendleton platform established a repeatable development model for Experience Interaction’s spirits portfolio — consistent architecture, predictable timelines, and editorial independence from launch.
