THE BACKSTORY

Tito’s Homemade Vodka came to the HuffPost Partner Studio with a simple request. They wanted us to build something we’d never built before, and they wanted to highlight the proud weirdness of the Austin distillery and its founder, the aptly named Tito Beveridge. It was perfect timing. For months, we’d been trying to find the right client for our first long-form, interactive article. 

The story we chose was an examination of a quirky theory hotly debated among social scientists: nominative determinism, or the belief that names influence the course of people’s lives. I told it through the stories of four individuals whose names seemed cosmically appropriate for their chosen careers — from Tito Beveridge himself to urologist Dick Chopp. (And, yes, I checked. That is his real name.)

I interwove text, photography, infographics, and interactive quizzes with the story of a real-life obsession: another Graham Nelson, a man whose life almost exactly mirrored mine. The piece nabbed over one million unique viewers, who spent an average of five and a half minutes on-site. It was nominated for the “Best Sponsored Editorial” at the 2015 Native Creative Awards.