Decathlon Wallet

Challenge

Decathlon had significant customer value distributed across gift cards (B2C + B2B), loyalty, rewards and refunds, but the experience of accessing and spending that value was fragmented across different systems and touchpoints. For customers, value could be difficult to understand, find and redeem. For the business, this represented a significant opportunity to improve engagement, retention and future spend.

Approach

I worked across Product, Engineering and market teams to turn that opportunity into a tangible vision for Decathlon Wallet: a single omnichannel experience where customers could earn, store and spend Decathlon value across digital and physical retail. My role extended beyond designing the customer-facing Wallet to mapping the ecosystem required to make it work, from earning and refunds through to authentication, checkout, in-store redemption and customer support.

Outcome

The resulting vision and prototypes gave senior leadership something concrete to evaluate rather than an abstract business case. The concept and proposed pilot markets received executive backing, specialist financial-regulation expertise was brought in to validate the model, and funding was allocated to take the Wallet into a country pilot. Design became the mechanism for moving the conversation from “there’s a big opportunity here” to “this is what we’d need to build to capture it.”

Concept, prototypes and markets identified during the process all got the green light from C-suite. After Deloitte were brought onboard to advise on financial regulation, they also approved concepts with recommendations of further approvals from the respective financial governing bodies of each proposed country for the pilot. Funding subsequently allocated to launch pilot in relevant countries in order to test a full experience based on the designs and experience myself and the team created.

The money was there. The experience wasn’t.

Decathlon already had multiple ways of giving customers value gift cards, loyalty rewards, refunds and other incentives, but these experiences had evolved separately.

For customers, this meant moving between different balances, vouchers and redemption journeys depending on what they’d earned, where they’d earned it and whether they were shopping online or in-store.

Existing research reinforced the problem: customers found the loyalty and redemption experience unnecessarily complicated and wanted a more direct way to understand and spend the value they’d accumulated.

The customer problem

1. Value was fragmented
2. Difficult to understand
3. Difficult to redeem
4. Easy to forget

For Decathlon, the same fragmentation represented a significant opportunity to increase redemption, customer identification, repeat purchase and retention.

So we started with a much simpler propositionWhat if all the value a customer had with Decathlon felt like real money?

A Wallet wasn’t a feature. It was an ecosystem.

An easy response would have been “Cool, let’s design a Wallet page.”

But that’s not actually the problem we discovered. For Wallet to work, we needed to understand what happened when value moved through the entire Decathlon ecosystem.

For this to happen, Wallet needed to connect

1. E-commerce
2. App
3. In-store
4. POS
5. Authentication
6. Payments
7. Loyalty
8. Customer service
9. Back-office tooling
10. Finance

I mapped the end-to-end journeys with Product and Engineering to understand where ownership changed, where technical dependencies existed and where a seamless customer experience could break down.

We worked through the whole lifecycle:

Making an uncertain future tangible

We weren’t designing a product ready for delivery.

The role of design at this stage was different: make the proposition real enough to interrogate.

Working closely with Product and Engineering, I translated what we’d learned into a cross-platform vision built around four principles:

Hold, Earn, Spend and Support

A global vision had to survive local reality

Wallet touched payments and stored customer value, which meant market differences, existing technology, contractual constraints and financial regulation could determine whether parts of the vision were actually viable.

The question shiftedWhat should Wallet become? → Where and how could we prove that it works?

I worked closely with Product leadership and market teams to understand the capabilities and constraints of potential pilot markets.

Rather than designing for a global rollout and discovering the blockers later, we used what we’d learned to narrow the vision into a pilot that could test the most important parts of the proposition in a viable market.

Specialist financial-regulation expertise was subsequently brought into the project to challenge and validate the model before proceeding.

Design as part of the investment case

The prototypes allowed senior stakeholders to experience the proposition rather than trying to imagine it from a business case.

They also made the implications visible: what needed to change, which teams needed to participate, where the unknowns remained and what would be required to test the idea properly.

The question shifted againCould Decathlon have a Wallet? → What do we need to do to pilot it?

Design helped move Wallet from an abstract commercial opportunity to an initiative Decathlon was prepared to invest in.

Learnings

This project changed my understanding of what a design deliverable can be.

We weren’t yet ready to build Wallet, so the prototypes weren’t specifications for a finished product.

They were tools for reducing uncertainty, exposing dependencies, surfacing difficult questions and allowing people across the organisation to evaluate the same future. It also reinforced that on work of this scale, alignment isn’t a phase of the process. It’s continuous, and sharing the work early and often helped us absorb input from a large number of teams without losing sight of the customer proposition.

Sometimes the most valuable thing a designer can make isn’t the product. It’s the clarity that allows an organisation to decide to build it.