One membership, every location.

IVEA is a large regional restaurant group with 30+ brands and 90+ locations — Japanese BBQ, ramen, hot pot, boba tea, Chinese cuisine, and more — each acquiring and retaining customers alone. The intuitive fix: let points earned at any location be redeemed at any other brand in the group. But Peblla had already tried a unified app once, and its failure defined this project’s red lines:

• Brands were reluctant to join — forcing customers to order through the unified app meant surrendering member data and marketing rights to the group
• Customers didn’t perceive the value — points could only be earned through app orders, nothing for dining in, so usage stayed low

The core question: how do you build cross-brand loyalty without undermining each brand’s autonomy?

The primary users are everyday diners who eat across different brands. They have no obligation to “learn the product”: if the points rules are confusing or the flow takes one extra step, they simply give up — earning, viewing, and redeeming points had to happen naturally inside the normal ordering flow. Meanwhile, each brand’s operators are key stakeholders: they care about member-asset ownership and settlement clarity.

Two pieces of competitive research shaped the direction: Toast Local (the value of an integrated platform that lets restaurants keep their customer data) and LettuceEat by LEYE Group, whose 130+‑restaurant Frequent Diner Club proved cross-brand points with tiered benefits work in a mature market.

We also mapped the full customer lifecycle (AARRR) and designed physical touchpoints per dining format — a QR code on a boba cup sleeve, a points reminder on the receipt, a server’s verbal prompt — so customers meet the alliance naturally while dining, never forced to download an app first.

The way past the brands’ red line was to move the complexity into the system. When a brand joins, its existing points convert one-time into alliance points at dollar value — customers see one alliance-wide currency everywhere. Underneath, a dual ledger updates both the alliance points and the brand’s original points on every transaction: tier programs keep accruing, and a brand can roll back out of the alliance at any time. Brands lose nothing; customers have nothing to learn.

Dine-in customers rarely want to download a brand’s app, yet the group needed one unified member identity — and forcing app-based ordering had already been proven unworkable. The answer was iOS App Clips: scan a QR code and the core experience loads instantly, no download — view membership card → view available points → scan to pay. The cost is a capability ceiling: the lightweight entry carries only this minimal loop, and richer features hand off to the full app. We accepted that limit, because in dine-in scenarios zero friction is worth far more than feature completeness.

Uniquely among our products, this project wasn’t driven by product management or engineering. Before development began, I led the presentation of the complete concept — UX/UI direction, feature scope, and three visual directions — to the group’s leadership; the project was greenlit only after the client bought in. To keep reviews efficient, the workflow ran in two stages: a UX stage of black-and-white wireframes discussing only flow logic and information architecture, then a visual stage coloring key interactive elements first to validate direction, with Light/Dark modes and one-click brand-color swapping built into the design file.

After the presentation, the client’s owner brought many feature ideas — and a two-month launch window forced trade-offs negotiated with data:

• Event ticketing: back-office records showed ~4 events a year — designed as a dynamic nav item that appears only while an event is live, held out of the first release with the design ready
• Social feed: furthest from the core value — deferred to a later phase
• Killed the standalone Reward Page competitors rely on: alliance points auto-deduct at checkout with no manual redemption, so offers live in Home/Explore filters instead — one less page, zero learning curve
• Home direction: three options presented (search-first, modular, AI-conversational); when a stakeholder challenged the search-dominant layout with a data question, I agreed to validate search usage against backend data rather than defend the design

Across more than 20 documented review sessions, I worked through the product-polish issues that decide whether customers trust their points: wording the points-expiration copy so it can’t be misread, designing skeleton screens for offline and no-data states, and making coupon scopes unmistakably clear.