The member experience they could describe but not build: live to 30,000 subscribers from day one.

Knobby is an Australian underwear subscription brand, selling over a million pairs a year across 19 countries and supplying the Australian Olympic Team. Around 30,000 subscribers get a new design on their doorstep every month.

The team knew exactly what they wanted their members to have: a place to see their subscription, preview the next drop with a scratch-and-reveal, skip a month in a tap, scan the collectable card that arrives with each pair, and browse every design ever released. The difficulty was that none of it exists off the shelf. The business already ran on five platforms: the store, the subscription billing, the mobile app, email, and reviews. The member portal had to sit inside two of them at once, as a screen inside the mobile app and embedded in the store’s own pages. Sign-in had to happen invisibly, with no passwords to remember, and be verified to a cryptographic standard. And the audience was not a test group: whatever launched would face all 30,000 subscribers at once.

Everything was built custom, and built by one person: the member-facing screens, the servers behind them, the database, the sign-in security, and the connections into each of the five platforms. The card scanning recognises a printed collectable card live through the phone’s camera, usually confirming within two seconds, using deterministic image fingerprinting with no machine learning involved; a still-photo mode sits behind it as backup. Skipping a month talks directly to the billing engine, so what a member sees is always what their subscription is actually doing. The whole portal launched to the full subscriber base on day one and has run in production since, with the roadmap still growing.

Every layer had one owner. Nothing fell between the cracks.

30,000Subscribers served from launch day, no soft launch

5Platforms the portal speaks to, one member experience

Delivered as Solutions Architect at Supernormal Systems.