zai Experience Club,
more than just a membership platform.

zai knew its products far better than it knew its customers

zai has made handcrafted skis in the Swiss Alps since 2003. Every pair is built by hand, sold at the top of the market, and owned by people who care deeply about them.

But the relationship ended at the point of sale. A customer might spend thousands on a pair of skis through a boutique or a dealer, and zai would never learn their name. There was no way to reach them with an event invitation, no record of what they owned, no reason for them to come back between purchases that might be years apart.

The brief was to close that gap: build a membership platform that gives zai a direct relationship with its customers, and gives those customers a reason to keep showing up.

Open the door

A membership platform gated behind a purchase can only ever reflect the customer base a brand already has. The people most likely to become zai customers are often the ones circling the brand before they buy, reading about the craft, waiting for the right season, and a closed door keeps them outside where nobody can talk to them.

So the club was built open. Membership is free with no purchase required, the homepage invites people in rather than describing a portal, and product registration became an earning mechanism rather than an entry requirement. Customers who register their products get more, but everyone gets in.

My Collection, where ownership takes digital form

zai’s products are physical objects with real provenance, so ownership needed to be verifiable rather than self-declared. Every zai product exists on Engage as a tokenised asset. When a member registers a product, they mint it into a personal collection tied to their wallet, which produces a verifiable record of what they own and unlocks benefits attached to that specific product.

My Collection is where that happens, and it is the heart of the platform. A member claims a product by uploading their proof of purchase; the zai team validates it, and the product appears in their collection as a verified asset with its warranty and complimentary ski insurance active. Skis, apparel and accessories sit together in one place, each carrying the benefits attached to it. A collection built over years becomes a record of a relationship with the brand rather than a list of transactions.

Keeping a human in that loop was a deliberate trade. Automatic self-registration would be frictionless and worthless: anyone could claim anything. A validated claim means the ownership record is trustworthy enough to hang insurance and event access on.

This is what allows the platform to do things a conventional loyalty scheme cannot: gate an event behind owning a particular model, attach complimentary ski insurance to a registered pair, or open an offer only to the people who own the ski it celebrates.

Events, somewhere to go

A membership that lives entirely on a screen is a database with a login page. The parts of the club that matter most are the ones that end with a member standing on a mountain.

Events is where that happens: ski test days and experience days at resorts across the Alps and beyond, from Courchevel to Samnaun to Špindlerův Mlýn. Members see what is coming, register in a few taps, and carry a visible registered status through to the day itself, while past events stay archived as a record of where the club has been. Experience card holders get priority access, and the vouchers earned through the tiers are redeemable against these events, which is the moment the loyalty programme stops being abstract and turns into a day on the snow. Registration also feeds the rest of the system, since zai now knows who is coming before they arrive rather than recognising faces at the door.

Community, people to go with

Members post photographs and stories from wherever they have been skiing, which gives the brand something no marketing budget buys: proof, from customers, in their own words.

We kept it deliberately separate from zai Insights, the channel where the brand publishes its own articles and films. Mixing the two would have made the member feed feel like a newsletter and the brand’s voice feel like an intrusion. Two tabs, two voices, one page.

Points and tiers, a ladder worth climbing

The loyalty structure runs on a rule members can hold in their head: one point per franc spent. Other routes sit alongside it, from limited-time campaigns to seasonal activity, so the programme can reward engagement and not only spending. Five tiers sit above all of it, each carrying a concrete reward rather than a vague status.

Vouchers unlock when the tier is reached, and members generate a redeemable code from their account to apply at event checkout. The voucher is the first reward attached to each tier, not the last: the structure is built so that zai can hang further benefits off the same ladder as the club grows, from partner privileges to access and services reserved for the tiers above.

Deals and rewards, two ways to spend

Two channels sit alongside the tiers: a deals page carrying member-only pricing on zai products and partner experiences, and a points-only catalogue where rewards cannot be bought with money at all, ranging from a key ring at 1,000 points to a guided day with a zai ambassador at 14,000.

Make it operable

A platform nobody can run is a prototype. Alongside the member experience we built the admin side: publishing and editing deals, posting articles and films to the community feed, reviewing proof-of-purchase claims, and an order tracker covering both cash purchases and points redemptions.

The operational details are where these systems usually fail, so they got specific attention. Shipping addresses are captured at checkout, prefilled from the member’s profile and snapshotted onto the order, so a member moving house never rewrites shipping history. Orders missing a phone number or a street are flagged before anyone packs them. Rewards that need no shipping, such as vouchers and event days, never ask for an address at all.