We're thrilled to dive behind the scenes of our first-ever Tappy Awards. 🥳
The Tappys shine a spotlight on the trailblazing brands leading the charge in mobile commerce innovation. With a focus on recognizing excellence in development, design, and innovation within the Shopify ecosystem, these awards celebrate brands that value building stronger customer relationships, all through the power of mobile apps. From sleek app designs, immersive customer experiences, multi-channel app marketing strategies, custom-built features, and more — this program showcases their work and amplifies their business.
Keep scrolling to get actionable insights, tactical tips, and inspiration from these winning brands that you can apply to your mobile ecommerce strategy.
Mastering mobile commerce is the name of the game now
In today’s insanely competitive ecommerce landscape, brands competing at the top must deliver a remarkable shopping experience to meet customers’ rising digital expectations. No pressure, right?
At Tapcart, our mission is to fuel the freshest and fastest mobile shopping. Nothing hits home more for the Tapcart team than seeing our customers win.
That’s why we created the Tappy Awards, to spotlight our clients' accomplishments. These brilliant brands are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in mobile commerce. From designers transitioning to mobile app development to marketers boosting audience engagement, each success story has valuable lessons to learn from.
The Tappy Awards
The brands nominated across these six categories are paving the way in the mobile commerce space, building stronger customer relationships.
The categories include:
- App Design of the Year
- Best Customer Experience
- Push Marketer of the Year
- App Marketer of the Year
- Custom Blocks of the Year
- UnTapped Voice of the Year
How did we decide who took the gold in each category? The DTC community chose the winners. The Tappy Awards voting opened on March 5 to the public, and it lasted ten days. We saw ecommerce brands, partners, agencies, and leaders show up to vote and recognize these nominees. Ultimately, the 2024 Tappy Nominees received 2,313 votes.
Ready for the good stuff? Now, let’s look at the winners and nominees of the 2024 hall of fame and get inspired by some of the most innovative strategies of the past year.
App Design of the Year: BrüMate
BrüMate, the fast-growing drinkware brand, has elevated app design standards that captivate and inspire customers while seamlessly making shopping intuitive and easy. The BrüMate team keeps the app fresh and consistently updates it with new content, making it a VIP destination for top customers. BrüMate can freely reacquire customers with push notifications (as opposed to paying Google and Meta) to bring customers back into the seamless app, efficiently boosting the bottom line.
App Design Lessons We Learned from BrüMate:
- The app's intuitive navigation design makes shopping seamless. The top navigation features the BrüCrew Rewards and Chat to highlight exciting CX features to nurture their best customers. The bottom navigation (AKA the thumb-friendly zone) makes it easy to instantly access all collections, products, and wishlists so customers can buy when ready.
- Sticking with a minimalist aesthetic makes the BrüMate app design intentional and straightforward. This is an intelligent strategy when considering first-time users and the small size of a phone screen.
- The app is consistently on-brand, including color schemes, types, banners, sale stickers, and images. The PDP features clean app custom banners that educate on product FAQs like that it’s leakproof, dishwasher safe, and has no metallic taste. Genius design.
"BrüMate is incredibly thrilled to win the App Design of the Year award! We recently updated our app to align with our new branding. Tapcart has made bringing our brand to life in an app experience simple. Working with Tapcart has been a game-changer, allowing us to easily update assets and integrate with our other tech vendors, providing our customers with the best shopping experience directly on their phones. We are unwavering in our commitment to our customers and are proud to partner with Tapcart to drive our company's successes."
- Erin Summerlin, Digital Art Director at BrüMate
App Design Tips from the Nominees
The nominees raise the bar for app design, elevating customer shopping experiences with fresh content, customer-centered UX/UI, and sleek app designs that captivate, convert, and inspire. The dream, right?
Learn from their nomination stories and download all the apps below
Pro tips: These brands take the extra step to customize the app’s design to deliver an enriched shopping experience. They also ensure that the app’s design offers something unique and exclusive to app users. This effort can help brands reach their goals to build community, grow subscriptions, keep customers coming back, sell products, learn something, or simply hang in the app. To highlight a few, Duvin features its editorial product photography (it’s giving the Vogue app) and even a Spotify playlist to set the vibe. StudioCult’s app design showcases super playful GIFs of products, which makes browsing the app exciting.
Best Customer Experience: Princess Polly
Princess Polly, the Australian-based women's fashion brand, stands out for its ability to create seamless shopping experiences with a customer-first approach, setting new benchmarks for customer satisfaction and engagement. The Princess Polly app strategy turns casual shoppers into loyal customers, converting 27% better than the mobile web and making the app the second highest revenue channel (after the website).
Mobile App Experience Lessons We Learned from Princess Polly:
- The app is the go-to destination for staying on top of trends. The team uses push notifications to drive traffic, focusing on sharing the latest drops, app-exclusive sales, and early access to new products. This leads to high conversion and strong retention rates. At the same time, push can be used as a free touchpoint to drive traffic, improve MER, and offset rising CAC, in addition to being a great experience for the shopper. The app is consistently updated with fresh content, so users keep returning to get the latest brand updates.
- Once the team gets customers to the app, they stay there thanks to VIP exclusives, early product releases, a loyalty program, and access to instant push notifications. Making the app uniquely valuable is a vital retention tactic to increase customer loyalty through word of mouth and to use the app for future purchases.
- The app’s customer-centric design prioritizes personalization with engaging features like leveraging Klaviyo customer cohorts for segmented push notifications, product recommendations powered by Nosto, and shoppable video feeds powered by Tolstoy. Leveraging tech tools to accommodate different shoppers and improve mobile CX is an intelligent strategy to boost sales and LTV.
“Tapcart is a must-have tool for Princess Polly. Upon adopting it, our app quickly became our second highest-performing sales channel and continues to scale thanks to the unmatched support of the Tapcart team.”
- Claire Miller, Ecommerce Manager at Princess Polly
“Tapcart has been a great additional channel to expand our reach and allow our customers to place their orders easily on an app. We have launched two apps with them and are seeing a higher conversion rate and LTV within the app than our site. The team has been amazing to work with. They keep us updated on new product releases and work closely with us to build features for our ever-evolving needs. I highly recommend Tapcart for any brand looking to launch a mobile app.”
- Melanie Huang, UX Ecommerce Manager at Princess Polly
Mobile App Experience Tips from the Nominees
These nominees are pros at elevating customer experiences in a way that’s unique to their brand. They offer immersive experiences that are engaging and fun for the shopper but also strategic from a business perspective. With a clean UX to drive conversions and thoughtful consideration of the customer journey, their mobile experiences are incredibly creative and innovative.
Learn from their nomination stories and download all the apps below
Pro tips: Look no further if you want new tactics to grow your community and drive customer engagement. Art of Tea’s in-app recipes, quizzes, and educational content make the app a valuable and personalized channel for customers beyond simply shopping. Shoe Palace’s app takes extra consideration into connecting the app with the in-store experience with QR codes and a barcode search functionality. This way, customers can effortlessly find what they want beyond the app.
Push Marketer of the Year: LSKD
LSKD, the Australian streetwear and fitness brand, shines with its creativity and excellence, setting new standards for engaging and impactful marketing strategies. Leveraging free and unlimited push notifications has always been a significant part of the LSKD app's strategy. As a result, LKSD’s mobile app has climbed to the top of the App Store charts 3 times, alongside essential shopping apps like Amazon, Nike, and Etsy.
The LSKD team quickly saw results after launching the app. LSKD's total revenue increased by 32.5% in the app's first month and another 45.3% in the second month. The app's quick revenue results blew the team away. Still, the reasons for the channel's success were evident to their team: the mobile app conversion rate was 3.1x higher than the website’s because push notifications from the app were driving traffic, and the app had a significantly better shopping experience.
Push Marketing Lessons We Learned from LSKD:
- LSKD’s push notification strategy blends transactional and non-transactional messaging to captivate customers with on-brand pushes to strengthen customer relationships. Using push for brand-building and value-aligning messaging is a great way to stay in mind with customers and offer value (not just sell). Considering how push is quick and easy to deploy (compared to email) and unlimited and free to send (compared to expensive SMS), LSKD takes advantage of push campaigns to offset high CPAs with better retention.
- LSKD segments its app users with Klaviyo automated push notifications. They leverage popular flows like a welcome series, abandoned cart, add to wishlist, back in stock, and order confirmation to support all points of the app’s customer journey. Paying extra attention to this loyal customer cohort can go a long way in retention. Moreover, push notifications are free to send to those inherently VIP app customers, making this type of communication wildly effective and highly profitable.
- With promotional campaigns, they capitalize on multiple push notifications to build anticipation and hype pre-launch, throughout the campaign, and up until the end. For the past two BFCMs, LSKD temporarily closed the app and website before the cyber weekend to peak demand and interest. LSKD has executed this strategy for the past two years, and as a result, the brand has secured the #2 spot on the App Store Rankings in 2023 and #1 in 2022.
“One of our values at LSKD is ‘Create A Community’. Our community is why we are here and who we work for. Tapcart has allowed us to engage with our community in a new and truly valuable format with push notifications for the LSKD App. It's not just about sales messaging and new releases; we can send positive affirmations and motivation to our community through Tapcart when they need it most. It's an honor to win this award and continue to provide value for our community through Tapcart.”
- Locke Fitzpatrick, Digital Marketing Manager at LSKD
Push Marketing Tactical Tips from the Nominees
This category recognizes brands that consistently push the boundaries with mobile push campaigns, employing innovative messaging and unique campaign ideas. These nominees have made their app a premium destination for its top shoppers to explore and engage with their brand — and the community clearly loves it. Establishing this value makes it a no-brainer for customers to want to opt-in for push notifications. From there, these brands are pros at exceptional push notification campaigns and establishing a solid brand presence on mobile.
Learn from their nomination stories and download all the apps below
Pro tips: Beekman 1802 sends weekly kindness affirmation pushes. These affirmations uplift customer reminders, fostering a strong connection with the brand’s ethos. Obvi also sends pushes as reminders to drink water or make time for a walk. These brands get how push notifications fit into the retention flywheel (with email and SMS) and serve as a direct engagement tool. Rentoza leverages TapAI to effectively prep pushes and streamline its team’s operational workflows.
App Marketer of the Year: Brown Sugar Babe
Brown Sugar Babe, the skincare & aromatherapy brand, demonstrates unparalleled expertise in promoting its mobile app and establishing a solid brand presence in the mobile space. With a robust multichannel marketing strategy focused on driving app downloads, the company has effectively turned fleeting customers into brand fans — ultimately scaling LTV in the long run.
Mobile App Marketing Lessons We Learned from Brown Sugar Babe:
- The beauty brand’s app marketing leverages push notifications, QR codes, SMS, and email campaigns to drive app downloads, engagement, and traffic effectively.
- For BFCM 2023, the team made a splash promoting an exciting app exclusive to incentivize app downloads. This included a targeted push notification campaign and QR codes placed strategically throughout the website to build hype. The Brown Sugar Babe app saw $275K in app sales during cyber week alone, contributing to a 459% month-over-month increase in mobile app revenue from October to November. It’s clear their customers are loving the experience of shopping the biggest sale of the year via app!
- The team consistently shares the app on its social channels, like Instagram, with valuable updates like upcoming sales, restock alerts, wishlist features, and app exclusives. This is an intelligent tactic to reach their target audience since their community of followers is highly likely to download the app. It also allows users to share and engage with posts about the app — after all, feedback and word-of-mouth marketing are a marketer's goldmine.
- The team uses passive marketing to drive app installs and engagement. A simple QR code pop-up on the website’s landing page that includes a 15% discount drives awareness and incentivizes users to download, and makes it crazy easy. The brand’s IG linkt.ree also consists of an Apple and Android app download CTA. We love a set-it-and-forget-it revenue opportunity.
Mobile App Marketing Tips from the Nominees
These nominees have fine-tuned effective mobile app marketing strategies that raise the standard in app marketing and mobile brand presence. They see the value in a killer pre-launch strategy, continued app awareness promotions to drive downloads, and using push notifications to boost in-app traffic and engagement. Sharing the app’s value on social media, leveraging influencer marketing, email marketing, paid ads, and SMS campaigns can also help seriously boost app acquisition, prevent churn, and increase retention.
Learn from their nomination stories and download all the apps:
Pro tips: The BÉIS team promotes the app as the ultimate destination for a VIP experience, with in-app exclusives like previewing new products, unlocking BTS content 24 hours before anyone else, flash sales, and giveaways. Grunt Style consistently introduces a new monthly campaign to drive ongoing engagement and prioritize app exclusivity to incentivize new users to download the app. Simple Modern is also all about app exclusives (specifically early access) to organically build a community that, in turn, brings your VIP customers closer to the brand than ever before.
Custom Block of the Year: Groove Life
Groove Life, the adventure gear brand, showcases exceptional creativity in integrating unique features and setting new standards for customization and user experience. This category highlights brands that enhance their app’s functionality through innovative uses of Custom Blocks — and Groove Life’s feature creatively problem-solves for the customers, making the customer experience seamless.
Custom Block Lessons We Learned from Groove Life:
- The Groove Life app built a custom ring sizer with Custom Blocks. This hack helps make app purchases frictionless by creatively problem-solving a common challenge for jewelry brands — feeling confident in purchasing the correct size without trying it on first.
- The ring sizer feature is easily accessible in the app, so customers won’t miss it. It’s in the top navigation right next to best sellers.
- The Custom Block is an immersive and engaging feature; the ring sizer scales to the customer’s desired size and offers sizing options in US and UK settings.
- Understanding your customer's challenges is a strategic way to leverage Developer Tools and Custom Blocks with a personalization mindset. Groove Life effectively answers FAQs to eliminate purchase barriers. This way, brands can build unique features specific to their customers' needs, just like Groove Life.
“Tapcart has allowed us to significantly enhance our customer experience by providing a seamless mobile shopping platform. With Tapcart, our customers can easily browse, purchase, and engage with our products, improving accessibility and convenience. This has boosted sales and fostered stronger connections with our audience, ultimately driving greater satisfaction and loyalty.”
- Emily Newcomb, Director of Ecommerce at Groove Life
Custom Block Tactical Tips from the Nominees
These nominees have built highly customized mobile app experiences with Tapcart’s Custom Blocks and Developer’s Tools. This innovative approach to creating unique features is a surefire way to wow customers, drive loyalty, and nurture community.
Learn from their nomination stories and download all the apps:
Pro tips: WelleCo has built interactive tools to track monthly wellness goals, yearly energy, and mood tracker (coupled with push notifications) to serve as reminders for greens intake. These thoughtful features incentivize engagement, foster stronger customer connections, and ensure retention. Gamer Supps has a dynamic ‘Gift with Purchase’ progress bar on their cart page, boosting AOV. Dyper focuses on design and UGC by building custom live social feeds and dynamic content carousels in the app.
UnTapped Voice of the Year: Jason Haven at Lauriebelles
This category spotlights UnTapped members who actively support their peers and contribute to fostering a collaborative community. UnTapped connects DTC leaders worldwide in a digital space that aims to help brands level up, retain customers, and find inspiration daily. The Slack community hosts collaborative conversations on new solutions, virtual and IRL events, co-marketing opportunities, an insider look at Tapcart’s product launches, and the latest ecommerce updates.
Leadership Lessons We Learned from Jason Haven:
- Jason Haven at Lauribelles is committed to sharing knowledge, fostering connections, and celebrating the achievements of others.
- He is consistently active in community discussions and always ready to help by sharing wins, and actively asks and answers questions
- Jason contributes to the community hub, being a learning resource for others. He demonstrates his commitment to collective knowledge sharing in the ecommerce community, which makes him a key figure in fostering a collaborative environment.
"Lauriebelles runs a lean team that has to make changes and iterate through ideas quickly. Tapcart has enabled us to give our customers a first-class app experience with a very light lift on our end."
- Jason Haven, Web Developer at Lauriebelles
Leadership Tips from the Nominees
These DTC leaders are pioneering the mobile commerce space and building stronger customer relationships. By consistently connecting with the community and sharing their experiences and insights, they make UnTapped a collaborative and intentional resource.
Learn from their nomination stories and download all the apps:
- Melanie Huang & Claire Miller (Princess Polly)
- Blake Van Putten (CISE)
- Hanna Houglum (Art of Tea)
- Sandy Mosqueda (The Hundreds)
Pro tips: These experts are professionals at providing value. In this community, they actively share tips to build your brand, chat about trending topics like Web3 tech, and offer tactical growth hack solutions from their own experiences. So moral of the story is to put yourself out there. Find out something good? Share it. Learn a tough lesson? Help the future you avoid making that same mistake. Providing value will allow you to develop into an industry expert and grow your following — and this community is the best place to start to be your authentic self.
Special shoutout to our DTC community for choosing the winners
A huge thank you to all the folks who voted and shared on social. The Tappy Awards is all about showcasing these brands’ work and amplifying their businesses.
The Tapcart team was also beyond stoked to celebrate all these brands and shine a light on their business. We’re a squad of 100+ B2B marketers, customer success folks, innovative product developers, DTC partnership operators, and sales peeps. Being at the intersection of tech and ecommerce, we interact with Tapcart-powered apps all day, every day.
We’re now officially taking bets on who will win next year and make the 2025 Hall of Fame… 👀
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About the author
Content strategist and creative producer. I'm passionate about learning the latest ecommerce trends and helping brands scale their businesses.
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