Third Wave Coffee has three locations in Portland and a single loyalty card. Maya Chen opened the first shop in 2019 and launched the card six months later. She's never changed the mechanic: buy nine drinks, get the tenth free.
Why one card is enough
"Every time someone on my team suggested a second tier or a points system, we went back to the numbers," Maya says. "The stamp card was converting at 47%. No second card we modeled beat that."
What changed when push arrived
The biggest inflection point wasn't the card — it was when push notifications went live. "We had 4,000 card holders and about 900 of them had gone quiet. We fired one push at 28 days. Two hundred of them came back inside a week."
