Shuffle

The idea was to make rewards feel like a game: a card that paid back a random amount, up to 100%, on anything you bought.

As it was a card, we had around 12 months to test, build and get all of our approvals in order (FCA, Mastercard and Apple/Google to name but a few).

First up, I made a quick brand and a clickable v0 (happy and unhappy paths included) to show investors what the team had in mind. It did a few other jobs too. It gave venues something tangible to react to, the engineers somewhere to start, and the approvals paperwork something to point at.

Outcome:

A clickable prototype and an initial brand later, we were ready for our first investment round, raising £2.5m.

We already had our target audience “Couples with two incomes and no kids, eating out at least twice a week”; now all we needed was a launch city.

To find the ideal site, we compared cities across the UK on demographics, income and layout.

Outcome:

Manchester came out on top - young (37% aged 20–39), walkable and packed with independent places to eat. After a quick trip up North to see for ourselves, we knew we had our launch city.

Then we spoke to around 50 people over two weeks. The pattern that stood out was that in most groups of friends, the same person decides where everyone goes. We called them the tastemaker, and they cared far more about curation and discovery than money off. Diners told us restaurant rewards felt small or pointless, and venues didn’t believe they worked.

Outcome:

Another general rewards product would be launching into a packed market, so I proposed we focus on restaurants, bars and cafes and make it curated. The places would be the draw, and the reward a bonus.

That left the card. Approvals weren’t expected until November and we were aiming to launch in December.

This was where I had an idea.

What if we offered customers a rewards product with the same app experience, random rewards and a curated list of spots, but instead of issuing our own card, linked to their existing bank account?

I led a workshop mixing Simon Sinek’s Why framework with the Five Whys, to work out what Shuffle was for.

We settled on “Bringing joy to your everyday”: pointing people to the best spots near them, and building a better local community as a result.

So the brand stepped back. A scaled-back colour palette, Onest for type (part humanist, part geometric) and plenty of room for the venues Shuffle would play host to. They were the joy, not us.

Working directly with the engineering team, I set up Shuffle to use a design system from day one. It lived in Figma with components, variables and clear documentation, and was mapped to the codebase and its states so design and development were working from the same thing.

Outcome:

The development team grew from one person to three, all working from the same system, which tidied up how design and development talked. It also gave the team after me something to build on without me.

After a private beta, we opened to the public on 13 September 2024 with 14 partner venues across Manchester (Pollen, Bundobust, Medlock Canteen and Madre among them). Customers were averaging more than 1.5 visits in their first two weeks.

Outcome:

1,176 people signed up in the first week, more than twice the 500 we’d aimed for.