Puma Already Won Me Over. Their App Never Noticed.
A retention case study built around Puma’s RCB partnership, and the exact moment a customer almost walked away.
Puma’s app had a banner (July 2026) that read,
“Loud. Loyal. Legendary.”
It’s sitting above a t-shirt for a football rivalry. Underneath that banner, in the same app, there is no loyalty program. Not a broken one, not a hidden one, none at all. I only found that out because I went looking.
What I found out was the problem is retention, specifically, what happens after someone already bought something.
THE GAP:
Puma has been RCB’s official kit partner since 2021. RCB won the IPL this year (2026). Puma is currently running an active fan campaign called #RCBEverywhere, in the middle of the off-season, with real prizes, meet-and-greets, match tickets, signed merchandise.
None of that shows up on the app’s home screen.
I scrolled the entire home feed, every fold, top to bottom. Two Formula 1 partnerships get featured placement, Scuderia Ferrari and Aston Martin, full banners, hero images, zero taps required. Cricket gets nothing. Not buried, not deprioritized, it is just absent from the one screen every user sees first.
To be honest, because I got this wrong once already in early research and had to correct myself: cricket isn’t missing from the app. There’s a real Cricket category, a 30-product PUMA x RCB collection, a second one for PUMA x Delhi Capitals. It’s just two navigation layers away from Home, while motorsport sits at zero taps. That’s a more honest version of the problem, and a stronger one, because it’s not “Puma ignores cricket,” it’s “Puma built the cricket business and then hid it behind search.”
WHAT 5 PEOPLE SHOWED ME:
I interviewed five people in Mumbai, a mix of hardcore RCB fans and people who buy Puma but don’t follow cricket. I handed them the app and asked them to just scroll, out loud, no prompting.
Five out of five missed the cricket content entirely. Every one of them noticed the Ferrari and Aston Martin banners without being asked. None of them found RCB merchandise until they used the search bar.
“I would’ve expected the RCB stuff somewhere honestly.”
“I didn’t even know Puma had cricket collections.”
“Why hide this? Since its India, I’d actually put this much higher.”
One person’s answer mattered more than the rest. He told me he tried to buy the new RCB jersey the week they won the title. It was sold out in his size. No waitlist, no early access, no notification telling him it was coming back. He just gave up.
That’s not a hypothetical loss. That’s a real sale Puma had already won and then let go.
The research showed a clear difference I didn’t expect. Cricket fans cared most about early access, even more than discounts or cashback. People who weren’t into cricket didn’t really care about those benefits. They wanted simple rewards they could use on anything, not team merchandise they wouldn’t buy. And one fan said something that stuck with me:
“If Adidas had the RCB jersey instead I’d probably buy Adidas.”
That’s an honest, slightly uncomfortable finding. The loyalty right now belongs to RCB, not to Puma. Puma is just borrowing it. A real loyalty system has to work harder than “we sponsor your team” if it wants to convert that borrowed attention into something that’s actually theirs.
A SYSTEM, NOT A FEATURE:
Puma India’s own Terms and Conditions mention “PUMA INDIA loyalty points.” I checked the app, signed out, then created a real account and checked again signed in. Nothing. No points, no tiers, no rewards, anywhere, at any depth of the account menu.
That’s actually good news. It means that I don’t need to build a new system from nothing, it’s a need to surface and finish something that may already half-exist on the backend.
The system I designed has three tiers, Rookie, Contender, Champion, using a bronze-silver-gold structure instead of anything tied to a specific partnership. That was a deliberate correction on my part. My first instinct was to badge the top tier in RCB’s navy and scarlet, since that’s the purchase that inspired the whole project. But Champion tier can also be unlocked by buying Ferrari or Aston Martin merchandise or any other team merchandise, and RCB colors on a badge earned by an F1 or a Football purchase would make no sense.
Gold works everywhere. It’s the one color that means “top tier” regardless of which partnership got you there, and it’s a metaphor sports fans already understand without being taught.
That decision led to a bigger one about color. Puma’s real app uses black for every single commercial action, checkout, add to cart, continue, no exceptions. I didn’t fight that.
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Puma’s app is deliberately monochrome. So I decided that the one moment it breaks that rule is the moment that matters most: becoming a Champion.
THE DESIGN SYSTEM:
Before designing anything, I studied Puma’s real screens to understand their typography, colors, and spacing. Puma does have a design system, but it’s not publicly accessible for easy use and isn’t licensed for outside projects. So I made my own reference using colors picked from real screens and type sizes matched to their actual headlines.
The single most consistent trait across every screen: zero border radius, anywhere. Every button, every input field, every product tile, sharp corners, no exceptions.
Every part of this system is based on something I actually saw in Puma’s real screens. I didn’t make things up just to make it look good. I used what was already there to keep it as close to the real product as possible.
THE FLOW:
The whole flagship flow is five screens and one notification, built around a single real customer: someone who just bought the official jersey.
They see their tier unlock immediately, not after collecting points over months, right on the order confirmation screen. The customer gets rewarded the moment they purchase and not eventually.
They see exactly what that unlocks, three things, stated plainly: 48-hour early access to the next drop, entry into signed merchandise raffles, double points going forward.
They see the actual next drop, with a real countdown to when their early access opens. This is the direct fix for the lost sale. The same purchase that used to just be a transaction now guarantees a real shot at the next one, before the public even knows it exists.
They get a notification when that access goes live, and tapping it takes them straight to the drop. Not the home screen. Not search. Directly there. That single decision removes the exact friction every one of my five interviewees hit.
They land on the drop page itself with one small, honest banner confirming their early access window. Nothing else about the page changes. No new colors, no new badges competing for attention, one clear signal.
WHAT I’M TESTING & WHAT WOULD STOP IT FROM SHIPPING:
The idea is simple: if we show customers their Champion tier right away and give them real early access, they’ll be more likely to buy from Puma again. I’d measure this by comparing repeat purchases from Champion-eligible customers against a control group that only sees the usual order confirmation.
But a rising number doesn’t tell the whole story. My own audit taught me that the hard way. I found a real bug in Puma’s checkout where two line items showed the same discount, making it look like customers were getting two separate savings when they were only getting one. If I only focused on the metric I wanted to improve, I would have missed this.
So, along with the main metric, I’m also tracking checkout completion to make sure it doesn’t drop, and support tickets about points or tiers to catch confusion that the numbers might not show.
WHY I THINK THIS IS ACTUALLY BUILDABLE:
I didn’t want this to be another loyalty idea that looks good in Figma but falls apart when engineering asks how it would actually work.
The good news is that Puma may already have much of what’s needed.
The mention of loyalty points in their legal terms suggests that some of the backend system may already exist, possibly from their older in-store systems. So this isn’t about building a whole points system from scratch. It’s about connecting something Puma may already have to an app experience that currently doesn’t really use it.
WHAT I’D STILL NEED TO PROVE:
Five interviews gave me enough confidence to move forward, but not enough to say I’m definitely right. I don’t know if people will actually want early access at a larger scale, or if Champion members buy more simply because they were already loyal customers.
That’s what the A/B test is for. I didn’t want this project to end with just a nice-looking flow. I wanted to show what I’d measure to see if the idea actually works.
This is the third project in my product, growth and experimentation design portfolio. The first two, ShowEra and PhonePe Insurance Activation.
