Birra Virgilius - Brand, UX & E-Commerce for an Italian Family Brewery

Birra Virgilius is a small craft brewery in Mantova, run by a family selling four beer lines through local bars, shops, and word of mouth. They had no digital presence beyond a Facebook page and needed one built from scratch: brand identity, product photography, and a website that could sell directly to consumers, not just describe the beer.

I worked as an independent consultant covering the full scope: competitive research, information architecture, wireframes, visual identity, photography, and the WordPress build itself. Because the site shipped with a working e-commerce checkout rather than a simple catalog page, it became the family's only sales channel once on-premise and retail sales stopped during the 2020 lockdowns.

Before wireframing, I audited two very different commerce models: Atacadão, a Brazilian wholesale marketplace, for cart and quantity-based checkout patterns, and Alibaba, for how a much larger platform handles cross-border B2B purchases.

Alibaba's flow buried the purchase behind a "Contact Supplier" button, cluttered product pages with sample pricing and shipping details, and left me waiting days for a seller reply instead of completing a checkout. For a two-person brewery whose only real advantage over a big retailer was clarity and trust, that was a clear warning against what not to build. It's part of why the Virgilius store keeps one visible action per product, Add to basket, instead of routing customers through a sales conversation.

The site organizes around Home, About Us, Our Beers, Store, Basket, and Contact. Our Beers branches into four product lines: Maya, Cappuccetto Rosso, Zanna Bianca, and Camaleontica, each with its own page for the beer's story, ingredients, bitterness (IBU), and food pairing.

Checkout runs Login → Billing & Shipping → Order Review → Payment → email confirmation, with a separate login module handling password recovery through an emailed one-time link. Keeping login as its own module, instead of a modal bolted onto checkout, meant returning customers could recover access without abandoning an order in progress.

That decision mattered more than expected: once the brewery depended entirely on the online store in 2020, a checkout that only worked for card-comfortable customers would have shut out a large part of its existing, trust-based customer base.

The store wireframe organizes the catalog by the four beer lines across two bottle sizes (33cl and 75cl), so returning customers can scan for a familiar label without relearning the grid each visit. Each product page surfaces the details a buyer would normally ask a shopkeeper, such as alcohol content, bitterness (IBU), ingredients, and serving temperature, directly next to the price and quantity selector, ahead of the "Add to basket" action.

Brand narrative: I developed the "Birra da Favola" (Fairytale Beer) positioning, tying the brewery's artisanal process to Mantova's storytelling tradition as the birthplace of the poet Virgil.

Visual identity: a warm, amber-toned palette and typography built to read as premium and artisanal rather than mass-produced, applied consistently across the site, labels, and social content.

Photography: all product photography was shot and edited in-house, with lighting, composition, and styling built around each beer variety's character, since the brewery had no existing photo library to work from.

Build: a responsive, bilingual (Italian/English) WordPress site the family could update themselves, with e-commerce built in rather than bolted on afterward.

Every bottle shot in the lineup, on the labels and product pages, needed the same just-opened, ice-cold look, and the brewery had no budget for a professional photo studio or a stylist between shoots.

The condensation trick: instead of chilling and reshooting bottles as they dried between takes, I worked out a repeatable way to fake fresh condensation on camera, good enough to reuse across the full lineup in a single home studio session. I recorded how I did it so the technique wasn't a one-off:

The site launched in 2019, before anyone involved knew why a working checkout would matter. When COVID-19 lockdowns closed the bars, restaurants, and local shops that Birra Virgilius depended on, in-person sales stopped almost overnight. The online store, already live and already handling real orders and both payment paths, became the family's main channel to keep selling direct to consumers through 2020.

It's a small case study by revenue size, but it's the one where the connection between a design decision and a family's income is the most direct and the easiest to point to.

Claudio Falavigna, the brewery's owner, and his wife at the Virgilius stand during an event in the city of Suzzara, Mantova, Italy.

• Competitive benchmarking against Atacadão and Alibaba checkout flows
• Site map and user flow, including a login/password-recovery module
• Wireframes for the store grid, product detail pages, and two checkout paths
• Visual identity, brand narrative, and full product photography
• Responsive, bilingual (IT/EN) WordPress build with integrated e-commerce