Chop Dawg

Mari Fitness wanted to engage their million strong social media fanbase via their own unique mobile platform.

The team at Mari Fitness, led by fitness entrepreneur and well-known healthy lifestyle influencer Mari Llewellyn, approached us with an entirely new vision of how they wanted to engage with their community. Over the years, Mari and her team have put countless hours into building a brand that millions of people meaningfully engage with every year — but they had never ventured into the mobile app space. Enter the all-new Slay app to usher in the next generation of the Mari Fitness guides. Slay not only provides a “handy” version of their current site's features, it also gives users a new, more convenient way to map out and enjoy their fitness journey. Users have quick access and it's easier than ever to keep track of their gym guides and watch exercise videos while they workout. The Slay App made its debut to the App Store Top Ten within twenty-four hours of its initial launch, and hit #3 at its peak on Google Play under health and fitness.

Messaging plays a crucial role in keeping users accountable throughout the fitness journey.

Notifications and in-app messaging needed to be uplifting, fun and embody the Mari Fitness brand voice. Throughout the mobile app, there are all sorts of engaging ways for users to track ongoing progress, goals, and personal stats. Crafting an uplifting message overall, because it helps keep users motivated and active on the app. From a usability standpoint, the Slay app has a lot of elements encouraging daily use. Besides the robust exercise and daily nutrition knowledge base, users can also browse and purchase available supplements and other workout gear courtesy of Mari Fitness. Slay app users can proactively complete their workout routines, launching it daily for Mari's trusted workout guidance, while tracking their progress, and sharing photos to social media — all in one place.

Steps Insitu is a training application built for nurses in the NICU to teach them how to handle high-pressure situations while making the right decisions to save lives.

Steps Insitu serves as a dashboard for trainers to use to monitor learners’ actions and display outcomes while recording these actions for the team to debrief at the completion of the scenario. The platform won best overall and most innovative at the Society for Simulation in Healthcare’s 2021 IMSH Delivers conference.

Take a few moments, close your eyes, and visualize the most perfect hot summer day. Odds are, you start to hear a jingle in your head. You know the one.

The one that plays on the neighborhood ice cream truck. That vision you’re having is pretty common for people in the United States. And it is all thanks to one brand that has been around since the 1950s, Mister Softee. Mister Softee is the largest franchiser of soft ice cream trucks in the United States. With over 600 trucks and over 350 franchises operating in fifteen different states (plus internationally), Mister Softee is more than just a brand. They're a staple in modern day culture and a classic fixture to any child's, family's, or adult’s summer.

Mister Softee wants to reach their next generation of customers through mobile.

Understanding that almost every child, teenager, and adult has a smartphone at their disposal, Mister Softee wanted to leverage this opportunity. Mister Softee wanted to create a mobile application that will allow anyone to see, in real-time, where a truck is, where it is going, and how close it is to them. Customers will potentially never miss their favorite ice cream truck again. They can track where a truck is and receive notifications when one is nearby. Trucks will be using geolocation devices and connect to customers’ geolocations at home or on the go.

The mobile application also provides a localized menu for each region that Mister Softee serves. Customers have the chance to pick out which menu items they want in advance. The mix of these two incredible functionalities means that Mister Softee franchises can see an increase in revenue from more informed customers. Furthermore, franchises will enjoy a quicker turnaround at each location since customers will be better prepared to order. This will lead to quicker lines, more returning customers over the course of a season, and better experiences. This equals more revenue and happier customers!

One of the leading media personalities in Philadelphia sports, Anthony Gargano came to Chop Dawg to launch a trivia app centered around sports fandom.

Anthony has an insiders view of what fans, teams, and sponsors want. On-air midday host at 97.5 The Fanatic, Anthony Gargano (or Cuz for short) came to Chop Dawg with an idea for an app called Cuzzo Trivia. Launching first in the Philadelphia sports market, Cuzzo is a sports trivia app looking to draft hardcore fans to prove their team fandom and compete in a Winner-Take-All prize system. Cuzzo's established network of local advertisers and sponsors offer up real prizes to winning fans, keeping ongoing user engagement high to power in-app ad monetization.

In-app sponsorship and advertising opportunities are key to powering Cuzzo’s monetization and gameplay strategy.

The Cuzzo app can host sponsored contests and show advertisements throughout the app and during game play. Everything that happens on this application is tracked for sponsors and advertisers. Who interacts with their ads? How often are they seen? What is their demographic? What prizes did users select that they want if they win? Sponsors can also take advantage of Cuzzo’s geolocation features for local-only events to encourage competitors to compete right from their own venue (post-Covid19, of course). Cuzzo Trivia can also tie in real-time trivia games with on-air radio, thanks to Anthony's engaged show fanbase.

From day one release, Chop Dawg built the Cuzzo sports trivia app to be scalable.

While the application is taking a local-approach first in the Philadelphia sports market, Cuzzo will be able to introduce more daily free-style trivia contests to other sports-crazed cities across the United States, and the globe. We built the platform's ecosystem to cater to future partnerships with live television, the leagues themselves, and other incredible vendors.

Innovative Vending Solutions is the premier vendor of massage chairs, with a portfolio of more than 5,500+ chairs in over 500 mall properties, 29 airport locations, and 100+ travel plazas throughout North America.

Innovative is the nationally exclusive tenant with almost all the major property management groups, distinguishing themselves as the operator of choice for the massage chair concept. Innovative Vending Solutions also offers Zoomaroo; the most state-of-the-art stroller rides in the marketplace. Zoomaroo is a colorful, contemporary ride that children of all ages cannot resist. They provide practical features the consumer has come to expect in the modern marketplace; cup-holders, handles, trays, all elements that parents love. Innovative is looking to bring a modern-day consumer experience in the palm of their customers’ hands.

Innovative is building an application for their loyal customers to get the best experience possible from their product offerings.

Fans of their massage vending chairs can not only complete a transaction all through the phone they will have the ability to control their experience on the chairs, too. With full customization, customers of Innovative can manage where they are receiving a massage on the chair, the pressure of the chair, and even the duration of the massage. Innovative is building an application for the customer to get the best experience possible from their product offerings. On the stroller side of things, parents and guardians of young children will have more accessibility and ease than ever before. With the ability to view in real-time what inventory is available and, through an easy-to-use QR code, parents will be able to activate a stroller to begin using right from the app. 

The app introduces a new loyalty reward program, where customers of Innovative products can earn discounts, promotion codes, free massages and rides.

A beloved American lifestyle brand, LA Gear wanted a dance-workout app to bring their retro-inspired shoes and apparel to a new generation.

The Greater Than Dance app brings fun, competitive workouts to users, with professional dancers featured amid in-app browsing of LA Gear’s merchandise.

Users can track their workout progress from a dedicated user profile, and compete with other dancers in weekly and monthly sponsored challenges. The app also includes a community component, with message boards dedicated to users sharing their workout progress and connecting with other LA Gear fans. In between dances, users can browse LA Gear’s available merchandise, and place orders directly from the app. A prototype today — coming one day very soon the App Store and Google Play.

Village Pledge is a gateway for everyday individuals to kick in pledges for HBCU graduates.

In the Spring of 2019, multi-billionaire Robert Smith made an incredible promise during his commencement speech at Morehouse College. He would donate approximately $40 million to pay off the entire student loan debt of the graduating class. This announcement immediately went viral, sending shockwaves throughout the media. The announcement did more than just elicit cheers and media inquiries however, it also inspired entrepreneurs Jeffrey Reeves and Claude Dixon. They began conceptualizing an easy-to-use model for the everyday individual to have a hand in empowering the next generation of HBCU graduates. 

The key when building Village Pledge was to offer users a variety of accessible donation options.

With a few taps, a user can select an HBCU (or more than one) of their choice, connect a payment source, and contribute via a simple “round-up” feature. Users can also set up a recurring dollar amount at the interval of their choice, or even make one-time donations. Then, at the end of a year (or as needed) they can review a summary of how much help they were able to provide.

While browsing Village Pledge, users can learn more about the HBCU of their choice.

The app also serves as a gateway for users to learn more about the HBCUs and its graduates to which they are contributing. Background on academics programs, extracurricular activities and campus life, any social media presence and contact information. Chop Dawg designed the app so users can easily see how much they have contributed. The color system shows users whether or not their donations are still active, and they have the option to make changes at any point and set the donation increment as low as they want.

Offering services in New York City, Washington DC, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, Barkly Pets has become one of the largest dog walking services in the US.

Since 2015, Barkly Pets has been on a mission to help our four-legged best friends. They came to Chop Dawg looking to build a web app companion to their existing mobile app, alongside an app-redesign.

By providing background checks and professional, highly-trained dog walkers, dog owners can be assured that their four-legged companions will get the exercise, socialization, and attention needed for a long, happy life. Part of the scalability plan behind Barkly is to bring their mobile app experience to the desktop, through a beautiful yet easy-to-use responsive website application.

We built the entire frontend through the ReactJS framework for the Barkly team to then take over.

Chop Dawg assisted the Barkly Pets team with bringing their mobile application experience to desktop. The entire frontend web application was fully designed and programmed, ready for the Barkly Pets team to take-over and begin implementing their backend logic and APIs.

As Barkly Pets continues to aggressively grow, they've begun investing in new ways to capture more potential customers.

Chop Dawg worked with Barkly Pets to make sure that their website application was beautiful, easy-to-use, and scalable. We also painstakingly re-designed their existing mobile app to match their new web app. Scalability was always important to keep in mind throughout this process, as they were expanding their dog walking capabilities in their existing cities and future growth cities. To keep things scalable without being dependent on Chop Dawg, Barkly Pets was provided with a design library, the completed programming in ReactJS, and a detailed JSDoc containing relevant programming documentation.

Overcoming Multiple Sclerosis (OMS) is a global charity with a growing community of people from around the world who are making lifestyle changes to help manage their symptoms and live well with multiple sclerosis (MS).

They’ve developed invaluable free resources and guides over the years for those living with MS, all built around the OMS 7-Step Recovery Program developed by Professor George Jelinek. Their mission-driven work teaches that with commitment to the right lifestyle changes, there is the real probability that many people with MS can live long, healthy lives, relatively free of the usual problems associated with the illness. The promise of the Overcoming MS app means a more interactive, easier way for their global community to access these proven methods for living a healthy lifestyle with MS — from managing diet and exercise, to supplements, medicines, even meditation.

Overcoming MS has a rich background of supporting individuals with MS and their loved ones as a charitable organization.

With our teams working together, we can now provide a powerful app that puts these resources (and more) directly into a user’s hands. With the Overcoming MS app, users can quickly and easily build (then keep track of) a routine for care, eventually becoming confident enough to graduate from the app and apply their knowledge to their daily life. We also built a state-of-the-art admin backend to easily track metrics and organize existing and new content to help users live well and feel better.

The app provides in-depth guides to nutrition, medicine, and wellness measures designed to help those living with MS feel their best.

The app is free and set to expand upon an already thriving network of resources and community support built for those living with MS, and their loved ones. Users can get specific, easy-to-follow directions on their care and maintaining their wellness. They can also reach out to the OMS community for support.