Headless CMS · Hospitality · Creative Development · 2025
Wyld Motion
Wyld Motion is a hospitality collective that builds and scales restaurants, bars, and F&B experiences globally, from concept development to franchise expansion to venue operations. They needed a digital presence that could hold its own in boardrooms with investors, landlords, and hospitality operators, while still communicating the creative energy that makes their work distinctive. The challenge was positioning a company that is simultaneously a consultancy, a creative agency, and an operations firm, without feeling like it's trying to be all three.
Headless Architecture for a Content-Heavy Brand
Wyld Motion's team needed to publish industry news, update projects, and manage their service offerings without calling a developer every time. I built a headless WordPress backend connected to a Next.js frontend via GraphQL; giving the team a familiar content management experience while delivering a fast, modern, fully custom frontend. Every piece of content on the site, from team bios to project case studies to the navigation menu itself, is editable from WordPress and delivered through typed GraphQL queries.
Motion as Brand Language
Hospitality is about atmosphere, and the site needed to feel like walking into one of their venues. The hero opens with a full-viewport cinematic video and a logo that cycles through four colour variants. The navigation uses GSAP-driven stagger animations with mouse-tracking interactions. Headings reveal word by word through custom blur-in animations. A WebGL light beam built with Three.js runs behind the call-to-action section. None of this is decorative, every animation reinforces the brand's identity as a company that understands how environments make people feel.
Structuring Complexity Without Losing Clarity
Wyld Motion operates across five disciplines: concept development, franchise expansion, hospitality placemaking, industry intelligence, and space design — with a founding team from four different backgrounds. The site needed to present all of this without overwhelming visitors. I structured the information architecture around progressive disclosure: you understand what they do within five seconds, you understand how they do it within thirty, and you can explore individual projects, team members, and news articles at your own pace.
Built for a Team That Moves Fast
Everything content-related is managed through ACF custom fields and options pages in WordPress: menu items, social links, team members, disciplines, CTAs, project portfolios, and blog posts. The frontend uses Incremental Static Regeneration, revalidating every 60 seconds so content updates appear on the live site within a minute of being published. The team doesn't think about deployments or code, they update WordPress and the site reflects it almost instantly.
Outcome
The result is a site that operates on two levels simultaneously. On the surface, it's a polished, cinematic hospitality brand experience: video, motion, editorial typography; that makes an immediate impression on investors, landlords, and potential partners. Underneath, it's a serious piece of engineering: headless CMS architecture, typed GraphQL data layer, server-side rendering, incremental regeneration, and a content management system the team actually uses daily. That combination, looking effortless while being technically rigorous, is the standard I hold every project to.