iGo Gift Vouchers launched

Brand new platform and website to promote, issue and process digital gift vouchers for sports kit

Last week we launched iGo Gift Vouchers – an exciting new website and platform for our colleagues at Cyclescheme.

Cyclescheme has become widely known over the last couple of years as the UK’s leading provider of tax-free bikes under the government’s Cycle to Work intiative. In December 2009 the company was rated as the UK’s fastest growing, by the Sunday Times Fast Track 100, and in May 2010 they won a Smarta 100 award. Loft has been deeply involved in helping the company achieve this success, providing bespoke technology, business automation and strategic direction that enabled them to grow from £0.3 to £22 million between 2006 and 2008.

iGo is a new offering from Cyclescheme that enables people to buy gift vouchers online, which then be can spent at any of 1,600 independent bike stores around the country.

Our involvement in the project started in early 2009, when it was a seed of an idea. Loft was tasked to look at the tech strategy and the business processes that would be required to deliver and administer a high volume of vouchers with a “light touch” – meaning minimal human oversight.

Core development on the project started just a couple of months before launch, during which time our tech team were able to use their experience on Cyclescheme plan and create a platform to automate all business processes for iGo.

The public facing website, which we created with our friends at Farrelly Atkinson, enables customers to customise their gift voucher with a personal message to the lucky recipient, which will be printed directly on the voucher. The site also uses the GeoLocation API to automatically detect where a visitor is in the country, and display iGo partner shops in their area.

Happily for all at Loft, the folks at Cyclescheme and iGo are exceptionally pleased with the result. Daniel Gillborn, Cyclescheme’s Head of Commercial Operations, said: “Working with Loft on very short timescales to launch a web based product proves that good supplier partners make all the difference – thank you for your focus and commitment”.

Stuart Roberts, Technical Manager at Cyclescheme, said:

“In more traditional development models the launch of the iGo Gift Vouchers site would have taken substantially longer. Loft’s excellent project management really made a huge difference in getting the site launched on time.”

Take a look at www.igogiftvouchers.co.uk