Rendezvu: Outdoor Gear Marketplace

Outdoor gear is bought on trust. A trail runner deciding between race vests does not want a review site, they want to know what someone who has actually run a hundred miles chose and why. That recommendation already happens, in podcasts, in race chatter, on social media, but it has no home and nobody involved earns from it.

Three groups each have half of what they need. Athletes, guides and coaches are asked for gear advice constantly and have no way to turn it into anything. Brands run ambassador and affiliate programmes through spreadsheets and email. Shoppers get recommendations scattered across posts and videos, with no way to buy the set as it was packed.

A platform where all three meet around the same catalogue.

Hosts build a profile and publish the gear they actually use, organised into kits: a full ultramarathon setup with eighteen products, a mountaineering list with fifty-six. They earn on everything their community buys through them.

Shoppers browse by person or by discipline and buy the exact kit as it was packed. Search works in plain language rather than filters, so someone can ask for trail shoes that survive a hundred miles and get results.

Brands run their ambassador and affiliate programmes on the platform itself, with their own shop presence, instead of managing relationships in spreadsheets.

Each group sees a different product built on the same data. A host manages profiles, lists and earnings. A shopper browses and buys. A brand tracks its ambassadors and its storefront.

The interface design was ours as well as the build. Three audiences on one catalogue is a design problem before it is an engineering one, because the failure mode is obvious to a user: a host managing earnings should not feel like they are using a shopper's app with the buying removed. Each surface was designed around what that group came to do, while keeping enough shared language that the three still read as one platform.

Native apps for iOS and Android from a single React Native codebase, alongside the web application, so a host can update a list from a phone and a shopper can buy from a laptop against the same data.

The backend runs on Node and Express, with Firebase handling authentication and data. Account type determines what each person sees and can do, so the same catalogue renders as a shopping experience, a host dashboard or a brand console depending on who is signed in.

Earnings attribution runs server side, tracking purchases back to the host whose list produced them, across every surface.

Six months from start to live.

The delivered platform covers three audiences across mobile and web: host profiles with curated lists and earnings, a shopping experience with natural language search, and brand storefronts with ambassador management. One catalogue, one set of product data, and three distinct products built on top of it.