How the Founders Met and the Idea Began

My name is Jakub, and together with my classmate Adam — my partner, long-time friend, and now basically a brother — we decided to change the way businesses and customers interact with loyalty programs. As students in Germany, we realized that the current ways loyalty programs are used are either extremely outdated (ahem, paper cards) or overly complicated (installing yet another app). So we started wondering whether there was a simpler solution that could streamline how loyalty actually works in the real world.

Frustrated with Paper Cards

I remember sitting with Adam over a coffee, paying on my phone, and seeing a stack of paper loyalty cards next to the terminal. That's when I thought, "how cool would it be if I could add that physical card straight into Apple Wallet, the same way I add a credit card" (no spoilers, but — you can). I'm the type of person who hates carrying stuff around. My wallet has an ID, driver's license, and maybe a health insurance card, and that's plenty for me. Paper cards are an impractical, inefficient way to collect rewards. 😅

The Solution: VEXiON cards

That frustration eventually led us to build a digital loyalty program — VEXiON cards. Why the name VEXiON cards? That's a story for another day and another article ;) Our vision was to create something that would simplify loyalty programs for businesses and customers alike. So we went looking for solutions. Like anyone else, we hit Google and searched "how to add loyalty cards to Apple Wallet", "how to convert paper stamp cards into digital ones in Apple Wallet" — and it didn't take long before we found what we needed. Concert tickets have been going into Wallet for years, so why not loyalty cards? We discovered "Loyalty Passes - Wallet". Exactly what we needed. Nothing new or revolutionary — just the right tool for our problem. 📱✨

Why We Did It For Ourselves First

You know what's the best part? We started out building this mostly for ourselves 😅! After pitching the idea to a few people around us, we quickly realized that plenty of others had the same problem — and they liked our solution. After all, who actually wants to collect a pile of paper cards? Nobody… And so our (now 8-month long) journey of development, design, iteration, mistakes, fixes, and a million other things brought us here: November 25, 2024, days away from going live. We launched the system at our first locations, where it's being tested by real customers signing up, redeeming rewards, and collecting stamps — all the groundwork for rolling the platform out at full strength.

Our Vision for the Future of VEXiON cards

Our goal isn't just to modernize loyalty programs and bring them into the digital era — it's also to reduce the waste from the millions of paper cards used around the world every day. We want businesses to manage their loyalty programs easily, and customers to have a simple, convenient way to collect rewards. We believe that with VEXiON cards we can improve the customer experience and make the world a little greener in the process.