Black Rifle Coffee Company built its app around a clear commercial core: subscriptions, product discovery, and in-store location. The existing experience does that job well. Dark UI, bold type, gold accents, a checkout flow that converts. What it doesn't have is a reason to keep opening the app between purchases. This project designs The Regiment, a loyalty and rewards feature that sits inside the existing BRCC app without disrupting its e-commerce DNA. Points are earned on every order, rank advances through challenges and squad orders, and rewards unlock in tiers tied to how long and how much a member has spent with the brand.
Year
06.25
Scope
UX Design, Loyalty Systems, Prototyping
Timeline
3 weeks
Loyalty That Earns Its Place
Designing a loyalty and rewards system inside the BRCC mobile app — one that earns engagement without betraying the brand's no-nonsense character.
Who BRCC Serves
BRCC's customer base skews toward active-duty military, veterans, first responders, and mission-oriented civilians who identify with the brand's values before they identify with its products. They're already loyal — they subscribe, reorder, and buy merch. A loyalty program for this audience can't lean on the tricks that work elsewhere: points inflation, streak mechanics, or referral spam. The audience reads those patterns immediately and the brand pays the trust penalty. The Regiment needed to feel like recognition, not manipulation. Earned access to better things, not a points balance to game.
Marcus Webb
Active-Duty Infantry
Monthly subscriber, auto-reorders his bag. Earns recognition, not rewards.
Monthly Subscriber
Auto-Reorder
Merch Buyer
Lena Carr
Veteran & Firefighter
Buys for her crew. Expects double points as a service member — no questions asked.
Veteran Verified
Group Orders
Reserve Roasts
🤖
Tyler Rosch
Civilian Fan
Found BRCC through social. Driven by challenges and levelling up his rank.
Challenge Hunter
New Roasts
Squad Member
Getting the Tone Right
Early concepts used military rank language throughout: missions, the armory, sergeant levels, XP. The structure worked — tiered progression with named ranks and a visual badge system mapped well to the brand. The language didn't. Testing revealed it read as juvenile against BRCC's genuine veteran DNA rather than authentic to it. The revision kept the architecture and stripped the cosplay. Rank names became Member, Loyal, Devoted, Elite, and Founding — language that reflects actual relationship depth. XP became points. Missions became challenges. The armory became rewards. Nothing was lost structurally; the tone shifted from game to program.
Built Into the Product, Not Beside It
The Regiment lives inside five screens rather than as a separate loyalty app: Home surfaces a persistent Regiment widget showing rank, point total, and active challenges. Regiment HQ is the full profile view — badge, progress bar, stats, challenges, and a teaser of locked reward tiers. Challenges replaces what might elsewhere be called missions, with filterable tabs (Purchases, Discovery, Engagement, Limited) and progress bars rather than percentage readouts. Rewards tiers unlock at rank milestones — merch, discount codes, free bags, and at the highest tier, founder calls and named bags. Squad connects groups of up to five members around a shared monthly order target, pooling points and splitting contribution bars per member.
Squad Orders
The most differentiated feature in The Regiment is the squad mechanic. Groups of three to five members name their squad, track a shared monthly order target, and each member earns a bonus when the group hits it. Contribution bars show who has ordered what, without competitive pressure — the display is informational, not a leaderboard. This mirrors something real about BRCC's customer behaviour: groups of veterans and colleagues often buy together informally. The squad screen formalises that without making it feel like a referral scheme. The invite prompt earns 200 points, but the mechanic works whether you're recruiting or whether your squad is already your regular order group.
The Regiment
The prototype delivers five interconnected screens with a consistent design language derived directly from BRCC's existing app: #111111 backgrounds, #F5A623 gold accents, uppercase section labels, and product photography in place of placeholder icons. Points replace XP. Tiers replace rank names. A countdown timer on limited offers creates urgency without artificial scarcity language. Military & Veteran Benefit surfaces verified double-points for active-duty and former service members — the one place where the brand's identity and the loyalty mechanic are genuinely the same thing. The Founding tier, available at the highest rank, unlocks founder calls, exclusive roasts, and a named bag — rewards that money alone cannot buy and that cannot be manufactured at scale.
