Absolut.com

I started the rebuild of absolut.com in March 2021 and it went live in summer 2022. I’ve built most of what you see there since: the design system, the market routing, the launch pages and the move from Akamai to Cloudflare.

One site, 15 markets

Absolut runs 15 market and language versions from the same site. Every market inherits the global pages and images and only overrides what is different locally. That way a global launch is done once, and a market can still run its own news.

Visitors get routed to the right market at the edge. Cloudflare detects the country and editors control the redirect rules per country, so nobody has to ask a developer to change them.

Akamai to Cloudflare

In 2024 we moved the whole site from Akamai to Cloudflare. That meant rebuilding image resizing and geolocation on Cloudflare’s side. I also wrote a small purge plugin so a page’s cache gets cleared the moment an editor hits save. It’s now used by five brand sites in the group.

Built for editors

Editors build pages from custom blocks: hero banners, packshot grids, a brand timeline, a bar locator map and a shorts feed. Each site has a __ui/ route I built for internal use. It works as a living component library where you can see every block and what a page can look like before anyone builds it.

Launches

I built the global launch pages for Absolut Haring (2025), Absolut TABASCO (2026, including a version for markets with stricter alcohol rules) and Absolut KAWS (2026).

Keeping it fast

Scripts go through a custom esbuild pipeline and only load when a component actually needs them. Since 2026 every pull request runs linting and Jest tests and gets its own preview environment.

Stack: WordPress (Bedrock, Sage, Acorn, Blade), ACF Pro, WPML, SEOPress, Tailwind CSS, Vite, esbuild, Cloudflare, Pantheon, Jest, Cypress, PHPUnit, GitHub Actions.