Designer to founder
For fifteen years I helped other companies make digital products simpler.
I worked across digital design, UI, UX, and the design systems whole companies run on.
I’ve worked with names you’d recognise, led the work, and shipped things used by people who’ll never know I was behind them.
Then I started building something of my own.
ZediPass came from a small irritation I kept running into: why am I still repeating my details at a counter just to join a loyalty programme?
Online, we expect things to autofill. In payments, we expect to tap and move on.
But in shops, customer loyalty is still stuck in the slow version.
Sometimes that means spelling your name or email out loud while a queue waits behind you.
Other times, it means carrying a paper stamp card that the business can never really learn from.
A customer might visit ten times, earn a reward, and still return as a stranger the next day. The shop knows a reward was given, but not who came back, how often, who stopped returning, or what actually worked.
That felt outdated.
If we can tap to pay, why can’t customers share details, join loyalty, collect rewards, and be recognised just as easily?
That question became ZediPass.
Built for the smaller business
ZediPass is built for the shop that does not have a product team, marketing department, data analyst, or tech budget.
The café with paper stamp cards.
The salon that knows its regulars by face.
The car wash that sees repeat customers but cannot measure them.
The market trader building loyalty one conversation at a time.
Many of these businesses already have something valuable: people like them and come back.
The problem is not that they need to become something else.
It is that the world around them is changing.
Big chains have apps, data, loyalty teams, marketing departments, and ways to bring customers back again and again.
Independent businesses are often expected to compete with that using paper cards, memory, Instagram, and hope.
ZediPass is my way of giving smaller businesses access to better tools without taking away the human experience that made customers choose them in the first place.
It helps them see loyalty, reward it properly, and build on it.
Not by replacing the relationship.
By making it easier to keep.
Making the idea real
A lot of people have ideas. The hard part is seeing one through.
ZediPass started as an idea, but I have designed it, built it, tested it, taken it into real businesses, listened to the feedback, fixed what needed fixing, and kept going.
That is something most business owners understand.
Building anything properly means learning, adapting, stepping outside your comfort zone, and carrying on when the easy version of the idea meets the real world.
I have had to do that too.
Speaking to owners face to face can be uncomfortable. Sometimes people get it immediately. Sometimes they challenge it. Sometimes they are too busy, too sceptical, or too used to the way things have always been done.
But those conversations matter.
They show me what business owners actually need, what customers will actually use, and where ZediPass has to become simpler, clearer, and more useful.
That is the work now: build, listen, improve, and keep going.
Where it goes next
ZediPass is now being shaped with real businesses, not assumptions.
I have taken it this far myself.
The next chapter is about the right pilots, partners, investors, and people joining the journey.
I want to work with the business owners who believe their customers are worth understanding better.
The partners who care about the future of local retail.
The investors who can see what becomes possible when a working product, a clear mission, and the right team come together.
If one person can take ZediPass from idea to working product, I’m excited by what it can become with the right people around it.
James
