Case study
Rendalls Competitions
A competitions platform is really three products wearing one coat: a shop, a live ticketing system and a broadcast. All three have to hold up at exactly the same moment, when a popular draw opens and everyone arrives at once.
- Sector
- Online competitions platform
- What we did
- Platform design and build, paid social
- Year
- 2025
The brief.
Rendalls needed a platform that could take a few thousand people arriving in the same minute, let each of them pick specific ticket numbers, take payment, and then run the draw publicly enough that nobody doubts it. The interesting design problem here is not the shop. It is the number picker.
Picking a ticket number sounds trivial until you have ten thousand of them, some already taken, on a phone, with a countdown running.
What we did.
- Designed the number picker first.
We built the ticket selection interface before anything else, because everything else depends on it feeling instant. Taken numbers, your numbers and available numbers each read differently at a glance, search jumps you straight to a number, and the lucky dip is one tap for people who do not care which they get.
- Made the state honest.
Ticket availability changes while you are looking at it. Rather than hiding that, the interface shows it: numbers grey out as they go, and the basket tells you immediately if something you picked has gone rather than failing at checkout.
- Built for the spike, not the average.
Competition traffic is not steady. It is flat, then vertical, then flat again. Pages are cached hard, the interactive parts are deliberately small, and the payment path is the shortest thing on the site.
- Ran the paid social alongside it.
We also run the paid campaigns that fill the draws, so the ads, the landing pages and the ticket flow are designed as one journey rather than handed between two agencies.
What shipped.
- Ticket number picker built for thousands of numbers on a phone
- Live availability, lucky dip and number search
- Payments and order flow built for traffic spikes
- Live draw pages
- Paid social campaigns run by the same team
What it does now
Draws open without drama, which in this category is the entire job. The picker is the part customers talk about, and the fact that ads and platform are run by one team means a campaign can be adjusted the same afternoon the numbers say it should be.
Platform performance figures are with the client and will be added here.