Give something free, sell something they want, keep the data
Embedded as sole designer at a consent-first event commerce startup, designing the sequence that turns a wellness event into a measurable sales channel without handing a brand anyone's personal details.
- Role
- Sole Product Designer
- Timeline
- Mar to Jun 2026
- Engagement
- Embedded, end to end
- Outcomes
- A three-move commerce sequence designed to run inside a live event, in under two minutes
- Consumer app, event activation and brand platform designed end to end
- Consent architecture where the brand receives a signal and never the person
A brand sponsors a wellness event. Two hundred people come to a yoga class in a Berlin venue, take a sample from a stand, have a good night, and go home. The brand pays for that and receives almost nothing it can act on afterwards: no sale it can attribute, no audience it can reach again, no idea whether any of it worked.
weDISCOVR was built to close that gap. I was the sole designer, embedded end to end, across the consumer app, the event activation, and the brand-facing platform.
The whole product is three moves
Everything reduces to a sequence that has to complete inside one evening, on a phone, while somebody is at a party and not especially interested in your funnel.
Give them something free. They claim a real product sample, unlocked at the event. Sell them something they want. In the same session, right after the free thing, they see a paid offer and can finish a checkout. Keep the data. Not their details. They opt in, and the brand receives a consented, anonymous signal it can act on.
The design work was making those three survive contact with a real room: two hundred people, a queue at a stand, patchy signal, nobody willing to download an app.
The event lives on one screen
The Explorer arrives with an email that has a link and no attachment. The link opens the web app, they sign in with Google or a magic link on the address they booked with, and the account exists. No download, no password, no QR to lose in an inbox.
Once they are in, the whole evening sits on the home screen in the order it happens: the event they booked, the gift waiting for them, and the offer that is only live tonight.
The ticket is the same object as the check-in and the redemption. One QR, held in the app, scanned once at the door. That scan checks them in and unlocks the gift in the same action.
The paid offer has to be tonight
The second move is the one that turns an event into a sales channel, and the one most likely to feel like an intrusion. The answer was to make the offer specific to the moment: tonight, in this room, for this brand, at a price that exists because you are here.
Keeping the redeemed gift at the top of that screen is deliberate. The offer reads differently when the free thing is still on the page.
Checkout completes in the app, and the order ships to their home. The brand never sees the address.
The data move, which is the actual product
The third move is where the business is. When someone claims or buys, they receive a wEID: an anonymous, hashed identity token that belongs to them. The brand receives that token as a verified, consented signal it can push into a CRM or a retargeting audience. It never receives a name, an email, or an address.
Beyond the basics, the Explorer chooses what else to share, signal by signal, and earns credit for doing it.
Why wellness was the right room
The activations run inside events that Curators already produce, in wellness, music and culture. That matters commercially. A yoga class of two hundred is a small audience by media standards and a very good one by every other measure: they chose to be there, they trust the person who organised it, and they are in the exact frame of mind where a skincare sample is welcome instead of intrusive.
That is what the brand is actually buying, and it is what the reporting has to prove.
The same trade at festival scale
The other end of the range was Karneval der Kulturen: a million people over four days, a street, and a crowd nobody booked. We ran it as the consent funnel POC, and the target was thirty seconds from scan to gift.
The booth does the first half of the work before anyone touches a phone. A co-branded kiosk with an oversized scan target and, deliberately, a product window: the Volée bottle and the Amazingy samples are visible from outside, so the gift is a real object before it is an offer.
The sequence is the same as the wellness one, compressed. Screen one stops you and names the gift. Screen two shows both items so the value is concrete. Screen three is the only ask: an email, two separate brand opt-ins, and a GDPR line, under the heading pick what you actually want. Screen four hands back a single-use code to show at the booth.
Splitting the opt-in per brand was the argument I cared about most on this one. Two brands funded the booth and both wanted the list. One checkbox for both would have produced a bigger number and a worse one.
The numbers are what made it a POC and not a stunt. A million people walking past, five thousand stopping, two thousand scanning, and a thousand consenting is a shape you can argue with, and it was written down before the festival.
Reflection
The temptation in a product like this is to lead with the data, because that is where the money is. Leading with the data produces a consent dialog in front of a party, and a room full of people declining it.
Leading with the free sample produces the same signal from a person who is glad to be there. The three moves are in that order for a commercial reason, not a polite one, and almost every screen decision downstream was about protecting the order: what the home screen shows first, why the redeemed gift stays visible above the paid offer, why one scan does check-in and redemption together.
The part I would push hardest on next is measurement of the third move specifically. Claims and sales are easy to count. Opt-in quality, meaning how many of those consents survive contact with the first retargeted ad, is the number that decides whether the whole model holds, and it was still a forecast when I left.