Brief
Sophie Ashton spent ten years building global campaigns for Moët, Polestar and Agent Provocateur before stepping out to build her own thing. loop is that thing, a community platform that turns intention into action, designed around small thoughtful prompts that get people back to actually seeing each other.
She came to me with a deck, a manifesto, and a launch window: three coastal-Australia events through the middle of 2026, Byron, Newcastle, Sunshine Coast, to seed a community in real life before the product itself ships. The brief was the brand identity, the waitlist site, and the full referral mechanic underneath it. Editorial, not techy. A community moment, not a product demo.
Approach
The site is a full-stack build that has to do three jobs at once: hold an editorial-grade manifesto, run a tokenised referral waitlist that actually moves people up the queue, and capture event RSVPs into the same database. Eight pages, Home, Manifesto (long-form, nine areas), About, Events, Waitlist, Thanks, Privacy, Terms, built around a single conversion: get on the list, get a referral link, move up.
The signature interaction is the referral queue. A signup creates a `WaitlistEntry` with a unique tokenised URL. Friends who join via that link bump the original signup up the queue, and the position recomputes in a background job that fires whenever someone joins with a `referred_by_token`. The thanks page polls the live position every 60 seconds, and Resend sends a "you moved up" email when the threshold trips. Event RSVPs write into the same waitlist table with an `event_id` discriminator so the three launch events feed the same audience.
Behind the site is Express + Prisma + PostgreSQL with a magic-link admin dashboard for Sophie, view signups by position, see referral counts, export CSV, manage RSVPs, all from one queue. Resend handles five transactional templates: waitlist welcome, referral position updates, event RSVP confirmations, newsletter welcome, and the admin magic link. Cookie consent is GDPR + UK PECR compliant by default; analytics fire only after opt-in.
Brand integration
The visual system is editorial-first, square-edged, paper-on-paper. The wordmark, set in Instrument Serif, italic l followed by upright oop, is the central gesture: a lean, a glance, the physical shape of leaning toward someone. The monogram extends the same idea by overlapping the two o glyphs into a connected ring.
Colour is built around `#C2544D` *bloom* over a warm paper `#FAF6F1`, with espresso `#8B2F2A` for headings and sand `#EFE4D8` for alternate sections. Typography pairs Newsreader (display, italic axis used as an accent across headlines like *"show up for each other, in real life"*) with Manrope for all body, UI, and captions. There are no rounded corners, no shadows, and no illustrations, the editorial feel is carried by typography, italic pull-quotes, and a 3 × 3 numbered grid of the nine product areas, set like a magazine table of contents.
Imagery is photographic and curated: long-table dinners, supper clubs, surfers at Byron, friends at café tables. The same energy as the manifesto, small, thoughtful, in real life.
Outcome
The brand identity is locked. The site is built around the manifesto, the nine areas, and the referral queue, ready to absorb signups from the launch events through April–August 2026. The admin dashboard goes to Sophie. The infrastructure scales straight through to the international rollout phases that follow.
The waitlist site goes live ahead of loop's coastal-Australia launch in May 2026. Live link will be added once Sophie's domain switches over.
