Akashi Sake

The Challenge

Akashi-Tai makes proper artisan sake—small batches, handmade by Toji (master brewer) Kimio Yonezawa and his team. The kind of product where "premium" actually means something.

Their website needed to convey that craftsmanship without being pretentious about it. They also needed multilingual support for their international markets and an age verification system that didn't feel like an afterthought.

Our Approach

We built on Craft CMS, which handles multilingual content elegantly. The site serves English and Japanese audiences, with content tailored to each market rather than just translated.

The design language mirrors the product—clean lines, careful typography, generous white space. Every element has room to breathe. The photography does most of the heavy lifting, and we made sure images loaded crisp at every screen size.

The age verification was designed to be quick and unobtrusive. Nobody wants to jump through hoops to learn about sake, so we made the process as frictionless as legally possible.

The Results

The site captures the essence of the brand: careful, considered, unpretentious. It's the kind of website where the restraint is the feature.

Sometimes the best praise is silence—no requests to change things, no complaints about performance, just a site that does its job and gets out of the way.