Northern Spirits Trading Co.
An Ontario craft rum e-commerce store on Shopify with AI-generated product imagery, age verification, and AGCO compliance.
Craft rum meets e-commerce
Northern Spirits Trading Company is an Ontario craft rum brand that needed a store matching its premium positioning. “The Spirit of the Great North” is rugged, authentic, and timeless, with a subtly cheeky “sorry not sorry” Canadian attitude. The brand avoids pirate cliches entirely.
The build
The store runs on Shopify with the Parallax theme (Out of the Sandbox), heavily customized through Liquid sections and snippets. The design system uses custom CSS properties for theming, mobile-first responsive layouts, and a warm color palette that reflects the rum’s character.
Product and lifestyle imagery is generated using a multi-model AI pipeline: GPT Image 1.5 for hero assets with text rendering, Nano Banana 2 for fast iteration on lifestyle shots, and Nano Banana Pro for final polished visuals. Each product gets multiple AI-generated images showing the bottle in different contexts.
Ontario alcohol compliance
Selling alcohol in Ontario comes with regulatory requirements that shaped the entire store architecture:
- Age gate at 19+ (Ontario legal drinking age, not 18 or 21)
- AGCO license number displayed in the footer on every page
- Sandy’s Law pregnancy warning visible throughout
- Ontario-only shipping with no interprovincial sales
- No health claims in any product description or marketing copy
- Responsible drinking messaging integrated into the experience
These aren’t afterthoughts. The compliance requirements influenced template structure, checkout flow, and content guidelines from day one.
What it represents
This project demonstrates building within tight regulatory constraints while maintaining brand personality. The AI image pipeline shows how craft brands can produce premium visual content without traditional product photography budgets.