Lazo

A mobile-first digital gifting platform designed to make gifting effortless, social, and data-rich for brands

3x
3x increase in digital gift redemption rates
+45%
+45% lift in purchase intent post-campaign
0%
0% signup fee for brand partners

Client

Francisco Bonilla Kukhelmann

Industry

Digital Gifting, Social Commerce

Client overview

Lazo lets brands reach consumers through personal, mobile digital gifting. The platform works as a social channel and a campaign tool at once, with the data to show which is earning its keep.

Problem statement

Brands had no good way to send digital gifts that felt personal, or to see what happened after sending them.

Context

Existing gifting tools were either clunky or emotionally flat, and none fit how people actually share things with each other.

Pain points

Low engagement with generic gift cards
No integrated analytics on campaign performance
Difficulty converting digital gifting into new traffic or sales

Approach

We built two products sharing one backend: a consumer mobile app for sending and receiving gifts, built around video messages and social sharing, and a web dashboard where brands create campaigns and watch the results come in.

Technologies used

React Native (Mobile App), Laravel & React (Business Portal), Firebase, Stripe, Google Maps APIs

Implementation details
Phase 1. Discovery & UX Design
- We started with research into how people actually share digital gifts and what makes one get opened rather than ignored. Mockups and interactive prototypes for both the app and the dashboard came out of that, with the redemption and sharing flows getting the most iteration.
Implementation details
Phase 2. Development
- The mobile app shipped with social gifting, personalized video messages, and QR-code redemption. In parallel we built the business portal where marketing teams configure campaigns and track ROI in real time.
Implementation details
Phase 3. Testing and Launch
- A closed beta with early partners caught the performance and UX issues before the public saw them. Launch put the app on iOS and Android simultaneously, with onboarding materials ready for business clients.
Implementation details
Phase 4. Post-Launch Support
- Post-launch we kept building: deeper personalization, advanced reporting, monitoring, and quick turnaround on bugs.

Key outcomes

Digital gifting

Digital gifting became a top 3 driver of online store visits

Real-time analytics

Businesses gained precise campaign ROI via real-time analytics

+30% higher brand recall

Social video gifting led to +30% brand recall vs standard email vouchers

Client feedback

Francisco Bonilla Kukhelmann

CEO

It changed how we talk to customers. A gift with a video message lands completely differently than a discount code, and now we can see that in the numbers

Tech Stack

Backend
- Laravel 10 REST API on ECS Fargate (PHP 8.2) behind ALB
- Aurora PostgreSQL (multi-AZ) for transactional data
- ElastiCache Redis for queues, caching, rate limits
- SQS + EventBridge for async jobs and system events
- AWS MediaConvert for video greetings (transcode/thumbnails)
- Amazon Location Service for places, geocoding, and maps; Stripe for payments & webhooks
Frontend
- React Native (iOS/Android) with deep links and share sheets
- Push notifications via SNS to APNs/FCM
- Business portal: React 18 SPA on S3 + CloudFront
- Auth flows integrated with Cognito and JWT session handoff
- Offline-friendly asset strategy and background uploads
- Media rendering optimized via CloudFront and responsive players
Infrastructure
- VPC with private subnets, NAT Gateways, Route 53 DNS
- Application Load Balancer with path-based routing & health checks
- S3 for uploads/static assets with presigned URLs & multipart uploads
- CloudFront CDN (cache policies, signed cookies for protected media)
- CI/CD with CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy (blue/green for ECS)
- Observability via CloudWatch logs/metrics/alarms, X-Ray tracing, OpenSearch
Security
- Cognito user pools + social sign-in; RBAC for admin portal; JWT to API
- AWS WAF on CloudFront/ALB, Shield Standard, rate-limit & bot rules
- Secrets Manager & Parameter Store for credentials/config
- KMS-backed encryption at rest (S3, Aurora, EBS) and TLS 1.2+ in transit
- GDPR-ready consent, retention policies, and auditable admin actions (CloudTrail)
- Webhook signature verification (Stripe) and least-privilege IAM throughout

Before implementation

After implementation

Key takeaways

Lessons learned

Social and emotional UX elements significantly boost campaign virality
Offering gifting as a "channel" is more effective than treating it as a one-off promotion