loyalty-program
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Giant Food
For 90 years Giant Food has run the same play in the same four zip-code clusters: know the Beltway shopper better than anyone from out of town ever could.
Applebee's Neighborhood Grill + Bar
How a Georgia "Rx for Edibles & Elixirs" grew into a 1,500-restaurant franchise machine that runs on riblets, dollar margaritas, and the promise that you already belong.
Del Taco
The Mojave taco stand that grew into America's number-two Mexican drive-thru now serves fries next to burritos, runs a loyalty app with four heat-rated tiers, and just changed hands for the second time in three years.
PENN Entertainment, Inc.
How a family racetrack in Grantville, Pennsylvania grew into a 43-property casino operator - and why it just walked away from ESPN to bet on its own brand.
Cinemark
The Texas chain that turned reduced-admission nights and a monthly ticket subscription into one of the steadiest seats in a shaky business.
Bonat
The Riyadh startup that turns a coffee-shop punch card into a data engine - and just raised $6 million to teach every merchant in the Gulf how to keep a customer.
Abercrombie & Fitch Co.
Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (NYSE: ANF) is a Columbus, Ohio-based global specialty apparel retailer that operates a family of brands - Abercrombie & Fitch, abercrombie kids, Hollister, Gilly Hicks, Social Tourist and the YPB activewear line - across roughly 840 company-operated stores, a franchise network and a digital business that accounts for close to half of revenue. Founded in 1892 as a Manhattan outfitter that supplied Theodore Roosevelt's safaris and counted Ernest Hemingway among its customers, the company spent the 2010s dismantling the exclusionary teen-mall identity it had built in the 1990s and 2000s. Under CEO Fran Horowitz, who took over in 2017, it split its two flagship brands into distinct demographic lanes - Abercrombie for millennials in their twenties and thirties, Hollister for teenagers - shrank store footprints, and rebuilt merchandising around a lean-inventory 'chase' model that reads early demand signals and reorders fast. The approach produced record fiscal 2025 net sales of $5.27 billion, a third straight year of double-digit operating margin, and one of the more complete reputational reversals in modern American retail.
Kohl's
Kohl's is one of the largest department store chains in the United States, operating roughly 1,100 off-mall stores across 49 states plus Kohls.com. Founded in Wisconsin, it sells moderately priced apparel, footwear, accessories, beauty, and home goods to value-conscious families, anchored by its Kohl's Cash and Kohl's Rewards loyalty programs. In recent years it has leaned on partnerships - hosting Sephora shops inside its stores and accepting Amazon returns - to drive traffic while working to reverse a multi-year sales decline.
Rack Room Shoes
Rack Room Shoes is one of America's largest family-owned footwear retailers, headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. Founded in 1922 and owned by Germany's Deichmann Group since the mid-1980s, it sells athletic, casual, comfort and dress shoes for the whole family across roughly 500 stores in 36 states plus rackroomshoes.com, operating both the Rack Room Shoes and Off Broadway Shoe Warehouse banners. The company is known for value pricing, its long-running Buy One Get One 50% Off promotion, the free Rack Room Rewards loyalty program, and a portfolio of national name brands alongside its own private-label lines.
Talbots
Talbots is an American specialty retailer of classic women's apparel, shoes, and accessories, founded in 1947 in Hingham, Massachusetts and known for its iconic red door and long-running mail-order catalog. The brand serves women who value timeless, put-together style across misses, petite, plus, and plus-petite sizing through roughly 470 stores, a catalog business, and talbots.com. Now owned by Sycamore Partners and operated within the KnitWell Group portfolio, Talbots pairs its New England heritage with omnichannel retail and personal styling service.
Lucra
Lucra is a B2B competitive-loyalty platform that lets brands run live social competitions - tournaments, head-to-head challenges and mini-games - inside their own apps and websites through a white-label SDK. Originally launched in 2019 as a peer-to-peer real-money sports gaming app, the company pivoted to selling gamified engagement as a modern alternative to points-based loyalty programs, handling compliance, payments and fraud as a merchant of record. Its clients include Dave & Buster's, Five Iron Golf, TouchTunes and ChessKings, and in April 2026 it raised a $20M Series B led by ARK Invest's venture fund - ARK's first time leading an early-stage deal.
MenuSifu
MenuSifu is a New York-based restaurant technology company that builds an integrated cloud POS ecosystem for restaurants, with deep roots serving Asian-American operators across the United States. Founded in 2014, its platform spans point-of-sale, online ordering, kitchen displays, self-ordering kiosks, loyalty and marketing, payment processing, and restaurant financing, now used by more than 15,000 restaurants. Backed by a $40M Series B in 2024, the company is expanding into AI-driven kitchen automation and fintech services for restaurant owners.
Rove
Rove is a New York-based travel rewards startup building what it calls the first universal, transferable airline mile - a single points currency you can earn without a credit card. Users earn Rove Miles by booking hotels and flights through Rove's portal and by shopping online through a browser extension tied to thousands of partner merchants, then redeem those miles across a network of global airline and hotel loyalty programs. Founded by Wharton graduate Max Morganroth and Harvard dropout Arhan Chhabra out of Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, Rove targets Gen Z and anyone locked out of traditional credit-card rewards.
Max Morganroth
Max Morganroth is the co-founder and CEO of Rove, a New York fintech building the first universal airline mile - a single reward currency that users earn through travel bookings and everyday online shopping, then transfer to more than a dozen airline and hotel loyalty programs across all three major alliances. A 2025 Wharton graduate who flew to 50+ countries in business and first class on points before he could legally rent a car, Morganroth co-founded Rove with Harvard's Arhan Chhabra, went through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, and landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for making premium travel rewards reachable for the 70+ million Americans locked out of premium credit cards.
Snackpass
Snackpass is a restaurant technology company that builds an all-in-one marketing and point-of-sale platform for quick-service restaurants. It pairs hardware - registers, self-serve kiosks, kitchen display systems and pickup screens - with software for online ordering, loyalty, SMS marketing, analytics and AI. Founded by Yale students in 2017 as a social food-ordering app, it grew into a full operating system for takeout, serving thousands of restaurant operators and tens of millions of guests.
Spoqa
Spoqa is a Seoul-based software company that builds tools for the people who run shops and restaurants. It first became known for Dodo Point, a tablet-based loyalty service that replaced paper stamp cards across tens of thousands of Korean stores and signed up tens of millions of customers with nothing more than a phone number. After selling Dodo Point to Yanolja in 2022, Spoqa rebuilt around Kitchenboard (formerly Dodo Cart), a B2B platform that helps restaurant owners order, manage, and pay for their ingredients - matching them with vendors and using AI to turn messy supplier chats into structured orders. Along the way Spoqa also released Spoqa Han Sans, a free, open-source Korean typeface used widely across the Korean web.