PurpleLane — A loyalty rewards app built from the ground up

PurpleLane is a dual-sided loyalty rewards app — Rewards with Every Visit. On one side, a consumer mobile app where customers earn and redeem rewards at partner stores. On the other, a partner store portal that gives business owners and their staff a simple, low-friction way to manage the programme.

The engagement started at Encrea as a full brand-and-product build. By the time it shipped, I had become a partner in the business itself — so every decision, from the first logo sketch to the final marketing video, carried real stakes. I created everything: the brand identity, the UI across both sides of the product, the illustration system, motion graphics, app badges, and the complete marketing push for launch.

This was never a handoff project. It was built — and stayed — as one continuous thread from brief to live product.

Designing for two completely different users with one coherent brand is harder than it sounds.

The customer-facing app needed to feel rewarding, playful, and frictionless — the kind of experience that makes opening the app feel like a small pleasure. The partner portal needed almost the opposite: minimal cognitive load, fast task completion, no room for confusion. Staff using the portal often had limited technical experience. A single misread interaction could stall a customer queue.

Keeping the visual language unified across both without letting the playful side undermine the utilitarian side — or letting the practical side drain the life out of the brand — was the central design tension throughout.

The other challenge was longevity. The app launched as an MMP — a minimum marketable product with the architecture to grow. The design system had to hold together through feature rollouts that hadn't been scoped yet. Every component decision needed to be extensible by default, not retrofitted later.

The work moved in four distinct phases.

Phase 1 — The Purple Identity
The brief was clear on tone: premium, respectable, but also playful and approachable. Purple was the anchor — a colour that sits in the space between serious and expressive. Paired with yellow, it gave the brand energy without losing credibility. The logo, app icon, and overall visual direction came out of this phase. The brand system was built to scale — meaning it needed to work at 16px on an app icon and at full bleed on a billboard.

Phase 2 — App UI/UX
Design thinking applied separately to each user type. The customer app went through extensive user testing before anything was considered final — the experience had to feel effortless, because a rewards app lives or dies on whether people actually open it again. The partner portal was developed in close collaboration with store owners and staff, prioritising ease of use and minimal disruption to existing workflows. The result was a product that looked and felt like one cohesive system while serving two genuinely different sets of needs.

Phase 3 — App Assets
With the UI established, the brand needed to come alive inside the product. This phase covered the illustration system — characters and scenes that gave the app warmth and personality at key moments (empty states, onboarding, rewards milestones). App badges gave users something to collect and display. Motion graphics brought the right moments to life with animation rather than static screens.

Phase 4 — Product Marketing
The launch campaign was built from scratch: onboarding templates for partner stores to get up and running, outreach materials for the merchant acquisition side, and a video spot produced end-to-end for the final product release. By this phase, the brand had enough depth that the marketing felt like a natural extension rather than a separate effort.