Turning loyalty into a
measurable growth engine.
Dutchie’s loyalty and marketing tools already helped retailers retain customers through promotions, segmentation, campaigns, and automated workflows. The next opportunity was expanding the platform into acquisition — giving marketing teams a more complete growth toolkit inside the products they already relied on every day.
Role: Lead Product Designer
Platform: Consumer ecommerce+ Retailer web
Timeline: 2 months
Outcome: Shipped referral platform across loyalty ecosystemThey needed a system they could trust.
Not another tool.
Referral programs were often held together through spreadsheets, generic promo codes, and manual operational work. Teams wanted a set-it-and-forget-it solution connected directly to loyalty and marketing workflows — with clear attribution, automated rewards, and visibility into acquisition performance.
unique complexity
Multi-location storefronts
Varying loyalty structures across retailers
Compliance and regulatory constraints
Customer abuse and shared accounts
Highly mobile purchasing behavior
Referrals weren’t a single user flow. They were an ecosystem.
A successful referral program required experiences across multiple surfaces and user types. Retailers needed tools to configure rewards, define eligibility rules, and manage attribution inside Backoffice. Customers needed simple ways to share links, understand incentives, and redeem rewards without friction. At the same time, the system had to remain flexible enough to support Dutchie’s evolving ecommerce architecture across different retailer storefronts and implementations.
Referrals only work if
retailers trust the data.
Retailers were nervous about fraud, fake accounts, and budtenders exploiting referral rewards. Attribution wasn’t just a reporting feature — it became foundational to product trust.
Through research, we learned teams needed stronger visibility into referral legitimacy, campaign performance, and customer conversion behavior. That insight directly influenced features like revoking referrals, expanded attribution tracking, and analytics that connected referrals back to loyalty engagement and revenue outcomes.
Designing a platform,
not a feature.
Referrals transformed
loyalty into acquisition.
Customers
incentives must feel effortless and immediate
Retailers
attribution confidence is the acutal product
System
design patterns scale features stay isolcated
Growth
Loyalty + acquisition belong in one loop
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