Responses by Neverland.

Background: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands asked to develop a campaign around the water problem in the world because when water has a problem, the world has a problem. The Drop Store is a fictional dystopian market that sells imaginary products originating from a world where the water crisis has progressed to dire levels. Through social channels, an e-commerce platform, an advertising campaign, and inside and outside the UN 2023 Water Conference in New York, people could learn more about how the water crisis directly impacts their daily products, their future and the issues that are already a reality for almost half of the global population.

Design core: We created a website where it becomes clear how much impact daily products we use have on the environment. Oftentimes, consumers don’t realize how many gallons it takes to create cotton, for example. Or what a bottle of water actually costs in the amount of water. The design language is clean and futuristic. The presentation focuses on products, and the identity has a funny, sarcastic tone. Here t Neverland, we are proud of all the effort we’ve put in the ideation and tone of the brand. We are so extremely happy with OWOW as a development partner. It really nailed the tech and 3-D side of the campaign.

Challenges: Since we wanted to highlight a world problem in a clear way and were at the table with parties like the United Nations, we naturally wanted to make sure this project went smoothly. The deadline was tight, and there were a lot of products to be created and rendered. In the end, we met the deadline and continued on our own responsibility after this period to make The Drop Store even better. Here at Neverland, we always say, “All it takes is a bit of pixie dust.”

Navigation structure: The site needed to navigate as an everyday e-commerce website, but then be a bit more engaging.

Technology: The website is built using Next.js with TypeScript in a Node.js environment. We used Tailwind CSS as our styling solution. We used WebGL with three.js to create and animate 3-D objects like the water ball and the story page video. In addition, we created animated image sequences fro some of the products. The website features extensive and complex animations, like scroll motion, animated page transitions, parallax effects and procedural motion, among others. Motion is primarily powered by GSAP.

Special technological features: We utilized server-side generation to export the entire application as static HTML files for good performance and fast load times. All static image assets, including image sequences, are compressed to webp for better quality and compression and faster load times!