Trollbeads

A loyalty programme from scratch to 40+ markets

Every story has a bead
Trollbeads has an identity problem it doesn’t always know it has. The logo is heraldic. It’s formal, old-world, slightly solemn. Of course, they’re not lions on each side, but Trolls holding the O, symbolizing a bead. But the the brand is seldom solemn – it’s playful, imaginative and story driven.

Trollbeads fans collect moments with each new piece. A bead for a birth, a loss, a journey, a person who is no longer here. The slogan is every story has a bead and it really matters to both brand and fan. The same silver bead means something completely different to two different people, and both of them are right.


When I designed the club identity, I looked at how Matas handled their membership sub-brand. In particular, how they made the word club feel attached to the parent logo rather than imposed over it. I took that logic and applied it to the Trollbeads mark. The word Club in a warm script, sitting below the heraldry rather than competing with it.

Going over the new club logo, I felt something missing. The crest is cool. The script is warmth, but what connects them is the reason anyone joins a club in the first place: a great passion for something. So I put in a small red heart. It follows the lines of the crest, and the large C in club, and it ties the two together, easing the both the balance and tension in the logo. The heart represents a common thread between every Trollbeads story, wherever in the world it begins.

The system
A single sentence brief meant I had to define everything. It began as just a few ideas on how it might look on the the site. Then I began to define what the club was. What it offered. How it worked. Who it spoke to and how. What it looked like across every touchpoint from in-store print to gated digital membership.

I built the identity system: logo suite, colour palette, typography hierarchy, and then immediately had to build the thing the identity would live inside.

I found that these were the main issues, that the club needed to address:

  • Customer data. Previously, the data belonged to the distributors. If a distributor partnership ended, that customer data was gone. The Club moved that data into HQ’s system.
  • Unofficial sales. Country beads, offered only in the particular country, was sold in unofficial channels. The club needed to regain control of the sales channels.
  • Increased sales. Increased sales would follow from everything else, but only if the club gave customers a genuine reason to stay. Trollbeads customers can turn into lifelong advocates. The club had to nurture the relationship between brand and fan.
  • Fans with no home. The fans were there. I could see it from the facebook pages and clubs. They just never had somewhere official to go. The club had to be that place.

That meant coordinating simultaneously with marketing, business development, logistics, IT, jewellery designers and external distributors across 52 countries. It meant designing the UX flows for the membership platform on Shopify, for both member and non-member journeys, gated content architecture, subscription logic, account management. I wrote onboarding documentation for wholesale partners and retailers. I designed newsletters and templates, the POS materials, the social assets, the club section of the B2B presentation decks sent to distributors.

Part of a large Shopify guide that went out to distributors, made in collaboration with front-end development.

The social assets were designed with a deliberate scroll-interruption device. I designed a hard white horizontal break in a 4:5 frame that stops the eye before the content registers, with the logo or call to action already waiting there.

Everything had to feel like the same club, whether you encountered it in a jewellery store in Copenhagen or a Shopify page in Australia.

The white break designed for SoMe feeds, catching the eye during ‘doom scrolling’.
In-store info sheet with a signup link.
An overview of some of the key benefits of a paid membership that was presented to distributors world wide.

The Result
The Global Trollbeads Club launched across 40+ markets. Mystery boxes sold out with every offering (with very few turns). Limited country beads, previously only available in their country of origin and heavily traded on secondary markets, moved into official channels through the club, recovering revenue that had existed entirely outside the brand’s control. The customer data from the club belonged to Trollbeads HQ, all of it now going through the database in Copenhagen.

The paid membership model drove higher engagement. Members spent more, participated more, and renewed. The Club Bead and the Country beads were particularly popular. The opening rate of club newsletters were improved over the regular newsletters.

Only after launch did someone tell me, that the club had been attempted before. Multiple times. It had simply never left to desk and gone live. I hadn’t realized how much building this programme would entail, but a year after I began, it was live. And it still is.