J. Rieger & Co:
Microsite
A global sporting event lands in Kansas City. Building the digital presence to match. (2026)
The problem
The FIFA World Cup 2026 brings six matches to Kansas City between June 16 and July 11. With over 650,000 visitors expected. For a distillery as rooted in this city's identity as J. Rieger & Co, that kind of moment doesn't come around twice.
The official KC digital ecosystem covered logistics well — schedules, transportation, venues. What it didn't cover was where to drink, where the local brands were, or how spirits fit into the World Cup experience. That gap was real, and it was Rieger's to fill. The challenge wasn't awareness, it was giving an international audience a meaningful, branded destination to land on.
Challenge
As the designer and developer behind this campaign's digital presence, my job was to build something that could serve two very different audiences simultaneously: longtime Rieger loyalists who already knew the brand, and hundreds of thousands of international visitors about to discover Kansas City and Kansas City whiskey for the first time. The experience needed to feel like Rieger: confident, rooted in place, and genuinely welcoming.
Goals
A single destination for everything Rieger was doing around the World Cup. A limited edition bottle. A citywide cocktail experience. Pop-up activations around town. Practical guidance for visitors navigating an unfamiliar city. All of it connected, all of it on brand.
Methods
I began by mapping the full scope of Rieger's World Cup activations - product, experiential, and physical, to understand what content needed to exist and how it related.
From there I defined the information architecture: four distinct sections, each with a clear job organized to serve both a quick-visit audience and someone exploring the full brand experience.
The microsite needed to live within jriegerco.com without feeling buried — accessible from anywhere on the site but its own world once you arrived.
Insight
This wasn't just a campaign, it was a positioning moment. International visitors arriving in Kansas City, most of them encountering Rieger for the very first time. That changes the brief. The microsite couldn't just be a promotional tool for existing fans, it had to function as a welcome mat. A genuine introduction to the brand and the city behind it.
Design is communication, and this was a moment to say something meaningful to a global audience.
Design Process
The architecture decision came first: a top-level section within jriegerco.com, standalone but connected. Each of the five sections was designed to have a distinct visual job while maintaining brand cohesion across the full experience.
Ideation & Prototyping
Four sections, one experience:
- Landing - Sets the tone and establishes the moment
- Bottle & Merch - Limited edition Kansas City Whiskey with original artwork by Jadie Arnett
- Cocktail Trail - App-guided tour of KC's bar scene powered by Seeker.io
- Rieger Around Town - Pop-up activations including Union Station and Cézanne gallery
Gamification in the Cocktail Trail. Points, badges, prizes redeemable at the distillery was an early decision that shaped how the section was designed. It needed to feel like an experience, not a list.
Key Decisions
Choosing Jadie Arnett to create the bottle artwork was intentional. For an international audience encountering Rieger for the first time, the artwork says exactly what the brand wants to say: this distillery is Kansas City.
The discipline was in scope. Rieger's role in this moment was specific. The spirit of Kansas City showing up for the World Cup.
Solution + Impact
A four-section microsite that functions as both a campaign hub and a city guide. Connecting a global sporting event to a local brand, with a product, a citywide experience, and a genuine welcome for visitors about to discover Kansas City whiskey.
Final Design
Rieger's campaign moment and a digital presence built to match the scale of it. One destination connecting a limited edition product, a gamified bar crawl, and physical activations across the city into a single cohesive experience.
Takeaways
The biggest moments reward the clearest thinking. Working across product, experiential, and brand touchpoints meant understanding not just how to design each section, but how they worked as a system. When the brief is this big, the most important decisions are about restraint, defining exactly what the experience needs to be, then building precisely that.