Heritage Saunas has won Design of the Year at the Wonder Global Awards, taking the top spot in Web, Digital & UX/UI - Website Design against entries from around the world.
It's a strange thing to win an international design award for a New Zealand sauna brand nobody outside the country had heard of before the site went live. Heritage Saunas builds handcrafted custom saunas for high-end residential clients, tying Finnish sauna tradition to local, sustainable materials. When we took the brief, none of that was finished. There were no saunas built, no photographs and no market to point to. What we had was a founder with real conviction and a category we were inventing the language for as we went.
So the site had to do the work a finished product shoot would normally do. It had to make people feel the weight of the redwood and the heat of the steam before either existed to capture. Every material choice, every typeface, every beat of motion across the page was built toward one feeling: that this was something rare and worth paying attention to. The judging panel backed that instinct.
The commercial result mattered more to us than the trophy. Within three months of launch, with zero paid advertising, Heritage Saunas was fielding enquiries from some of New Zealand's most prominent residential architects and homeowners. The site now converts enquiries at close to double the industry benchmark.
Heritage Saunas is also a finalist in Brand Expression Websites at this year's Best Awards. Two very different juries, on opposite sides of the world, arrived at the same read on the same site inside the same week. Good company to be in.
