transend Rewards
Driving Online Ordering Through a Loyalty Program for Transtar Industries
Transtar Industries, a leading distributor of transmission and driveline products, had built the industry's best online lookup and ordering tool — transend. But customers still picked up the phone.
The business needed to shift ordering behavior online. The answer was transend Rewards: a loyalty program that turned every online purchase into points, and points into more than 50,000 rewards — top-brand merchandise, travel, event tickets, and more.
The program had to feel like a natural extension of the transend tool itself, and it had to keep members engaged long after launch day.
Ordering online was already easier — customers just needed a reason to change the habit.
So the program did two things at once: it rewarded the behavior the business wanted (online purchases) and it made that behavior feel immediately worthwhile, with points appearing automatically after every qualified order.
No forms, no claims, no extra work. Buy online, earn points, get rewarded. It's that easy.
We built the launch as a templated system, not a one-off campaign — so every message, at every stage of the member journey, looked and sounded like the same brand.
A Templated Email System
Every email was built on a locked branded header and footer with an editable rich-text body. The Transtar and transend Rewards logos, the footer contact block, and the brand colors never changed — only the message did. That let the team produce new communications quickly without ever breaking the brand.
- Locked header and footer across all sends
- Teaser and activation emails before launch
- Welcome series for new members
- First-earned and last-earned engagement triggers
- Rewards catalog and promotion emails
Goal-Driven Engagement
The "Speed Purchase Goal" promotion gave members a personalized spending target — spend $10,000 online by year-end and earn 50,000 bonus points — with progress-update emails showing exactly how close they were.
- Bonus offer announcement
- Goal progress statement emails
- Percent-to-goal tracking
Print and In-Branch Support
A program overview poster and a direct mail card with QR codes walked customers through registration and activation step by step — meeting them wherever they were, not just in the inbox.
- Program overview poster with reward category photography
- Direct mail card front and back
- QR-code registration and activation flow
The identity paired the transend product's blue with a deep black, crisp white, and a teal-green accent — a palette that felt technical, modern, and rewarding all at once.
The signature texture was a blueprint-style pattern of gear and driveline line drawings: a nod to the parts Transtar's customers work with every day, used as a quiet background across the site, emails, and print.
The transend Rewards logo locked the lowercase transend wordmark — complete with its gear icon — above a bold REWARDS bar, so the program always read as part of the transend family.
I built the transend Rewards identity and the design system our team reused across every touchpoint — so each new piece stayed on-brand and moved faster.
transend Rewards lives inside Transtar Industries. The parent mark sits in the locked header and footer of every email, on the rewards site, and across the in-branch materials — so the program always reads as part of the Transtar family rather than a standalone brand.
A light, geometric lowercase sans for the transend wordmark, paired with a heavy condensed sans for REWARDS and headlines — technical but approachable.
Blueprint-style gear and driveline line drawings — a quiet background texture nodding to the parts customers order every day.
As Creative Lead, I designed the transend Rewards brand and the full templated marketing system behind it — from the program identity and rewards site to the email templates, direct mail, and in-branch materials that carried the launch.
- Program brand identity and logo lockup
- Design system and reusable templates
- Rewards site login and account summary design
- Templated email system with locked header and footer
- Teaser, activation, and welcome email series
- Engagement and goal-progress email templates
- Program overview poster and direct mail card
- Creative direction across every deliverable
Program results are still being collected and will be shared here soon.
This project proved how much a template can carry.
When the header, footer, colors, and texture are locked in, every new message becomes faster to make and impossible to get wrong. The brand stays consistent not because everyone tries harder, but because the system won't let it drift.
That's the real payoff of a design system: creativity spent on the message, not on rebuilding the frame.
The transend Rewards site: login and account summary with points earned, redeemed, and available
Pre-launch teaser and account activation emails on the locked template
Customer launch: announcement and welcome emails across laptop, desktop, and tablet
Program overview poster: how it works, why order online, and reward category photography
Direct mail card front: "Don't Miss Out on transend Rewards" with reward category imagery
Speed Purchase Goal promotion: bonus offer announcement and goal progress statement emails
Engagement emails: first earned, last earned, and rewards catalog features
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