The Brand: Hunter & Barrel is a premium dining experience built around the adventurer's table: rustic, fire-touched food that speaks to something primal. The brand's photography is rich with texture: flame, smoke, char, the shimmer of a sear.

The Challenge: Converting that visual quality into EDM click-throughs. The photography was doing its job; the static layout wasn't. My solution was to bring the existing photography to life with limited GIF animation, targeting the atmospheric elements already in the frame: fire catching, smoke rising, steam drifting. Rather than animating the whole image, I isolated motion to the top quarter of the frame. This kept file sizes lean, loops short and seamless, and ensured a clean static fallback for Outlook. The result feels less like a graphic device and more like a living photograph.

The response is visceral. Watching heat move triggers the same sensory pull as watching food cook, and that's the exact register Hunter & Barrel lives in. Click-through rate increased by 10%. For Valentine's Day, we took the 'touched by fire' ethos literally, using burned roses as the campaign's hero image rather than the expected florals.