How one of the country’s largest privately held businesses built its first-ever gamified loyalty experience — in 11 weeks — and opened the door to a new era of seasonal customer engagement.
At a glance
RaceTrac wanted its first-ever gamified loyalty experience live before the start of summer — a purchase-triggered board game. Stitch designed, built, and launched it on Braze in 11 weeks. During the campaign:
- Loyalty non-alcoholic transactions grew 21% vs. the pre-period
- Category participation grew 4.5 points year over year
- Daily app sessions rose 7.1% — the game gave customers a reason to open the app
- 86% of earned moves got played — nearly every drink purchase turned into engagement, not a forgotten perk
- ~1,600 new players joined every day
The Challenge: Turning Summer Thirst Into Long-Term Loyalty
Summer is the highest-stakes season in convenience retail. When temperatures rise, cold beverage sales follow — and so does competition for that purchase. For RaceTrac, the summer of 2026 represented a clear window: millions of loyalty app users were already walking through their doors, reaching for a cold drink, and primed for engagement. The question wasn’t whether customers would buy. It was whether RaceTrac could turn those purchases into something stickier — a reason to choose RaceTrac specifically, come back more often, and feel rewarded for doing it.
RaceTrac saw the opportunity clearly. The vision was a branded, in-app board game where qualifying cooler beverage purchases unlocked gameplay, instant coupon rewards, and a sweepstakes chance to win fuel or fountain drinks for an entire year. Agreeing on the “what” was the easy part.
The harder question was how — and who. RaceTrac had never built anything like this, and their internal team was already committed to several major initiatives on their quarterly roadmap. They were also working against a hard seasonal window with co-marketing dollars already committed. So they did their homework. They evaluated software platforms and agency delivery partners who could design, build, and operate a game inside their existing technology stack — which included Braze as their customer engagement platform and Punchh as their loyalty rewards infrastructure. Both were highly capable. Neither had a plug-and-play gamification solution out of the box.
What RaceTrac was describing — a purchase-triggered progressive board game with coupon delivery in-app through Punchh, real-time game state management, sweepstakes entry logic, and full multi-channel campaign orchestration — was a genuinely complex build. The kind of complexity that slows teams down and misses windows.
They needed a partner who could move at RaceTrac’s speed without missing a beat.
Why Stitch
The RaceTrac team chose to work with Stitch, its long-standing CRM partner — and build on Braze — to bring the gamification vision to life.
The Stitch team was already deeply familiar with RaceTrac’s martech stack. But familiarity alone wasn’t what set Stitch apart. Stitch also brought a proven, structured approach to gamification built specifically for brands operating on Braze. Rather than treating every engagement as a custom build from scratch, Stitch approaches gamification through a maturity curve — a framework that matches the right level of complexity to where a brand actually is in its journey. For a first-time gamification experience with a hard seasonal deadline, that meant recommending a build comprehensive enough to deliver the full vision while still hitting the window.
It also meant building with the future in mind. From day one, Stitch designed the ‘Fuel Your Thirst’ game as a reusable, re-skinnable platform — not a one-time activation. Whatever RaceTrac wanted to do next, they’d be starting from a foundation, not a blank page.
The Build: 11 Weeks to “Fuel Your Thirst”
With partners selected and a path forward defined, it was time to build. RaceTrac would launch ‘Fuel Your Thirst’ — a seasonal, purchase-triggered mobile game designed to drive repeat beverage purchases, increase store visits, and deepen engagement. Stitch would design, build, and launch the experience, integrating with RaceTrac’s rewards ecosystem to enable gameplay, messaging, reward fulfillment, and reporting from day one.
What made ‘Fuel Your Thirst’ distinctive wasn’t just the game itself — it was that the game became the center of gravity for a full cross-channel campaign. A combination of on-premise signage, organic social, and paid influencers drove awareness. Push notifications, email, and in-app messages kept players engaged between purchases. But the loyalty mechanic was the thread that connected it all. Every channel pointed back to a single action: buy a drink, earn a move, make progress.
To make sure the game was grounded in real customer experience — not assumptions — store tours became part of the discovery process. The Stitch team went into RaceTrac locations and watched how customers actually moved through the space. Great game design starts with understanding how people shop.
Creative was developed in Figma in close partnership with Digitas, with Stitch handling design execution while Digitas provided copy and in-store, radio, digital display, search, and social.
The Technical Architecture
Building a purchase-triggered game inside a loyalty app is complex. Three elements defined how Stitch brought it to life.
- Purchase-triggered gameplay. Every qualifying drink purchase fired a custom Braze event that advanced the player’s position on the game board — tightly integrating transactional POS data with real-time Braze Canvas orchestration. Buying a drink was playing the game.
- Punchh-integrated reward delivery. Coupon issuance, bonus point gifting, and reward redemption were orchestrated across Braze and Punchh in real time. In convenience retail, where frequency and speed are everything, getting a reward into a player’s hands immediately after a qualifying purchase isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s the mechanic that makes the game feel real.
- Local storage innovation. To solve for data latency between Braze’s in-app message layer and the banner content card layer, Stitch’s solution architects developed a custom local storage architecture to manage game state. As Ray El Khoury, Associate Director of Solution Architecture at Stitch, put it on launch day: “The local storage solution needs to be studied by everyone who has ever contemplated gamification.” Two distinct solutions were required — one for in-app messages, one for banners — because RaceTrac was among the early adopters of Braze’s banner feature, and the latency behavior differed across both.
The loyalty mechanic was the connective tissue for the entire campaign. Six Braze Canvases ran in parallel — each one responsible for a distinct moment in the player journey: welcoming new opt-ins, nudging players who’d earned moves but hadn’t used them, delivering re-engagement messaging before the window closed, managing coupon tracking, orchestrating sweepstakes entries, and keeping the drink purchase loop alive. Every channel — push, email, in-app message, content card — was firing in direct response to what a player had actually done in-store. The result was a cross-channel campaign that felt cohesive to the customer because it was all rooted in the same real-time behavioral data.
Stitch also built a custom live analytics dashboard that gave both teams real-time visibility into opt-ins, moves earned versus played, rewards granted, and sweepstakes entries — replacing manual reporting with self-serve access that the RaceTrac team could use to answer stakeholder questions on the spot.
‘Fuel Your Thirst’ launched on May 6, 2026. On time. In full. After 11 weeks.
The Results
‘Fuel Your Thirst’ was RaceTrac’s first-ever gamification experience, and the results reiterated that it’s an engagement mechanism worth continuing to experiment with and invest in:
- Drove ~1,600 new players a day
- ~86% of earned moves were played.
- 19% board-completion rate.
- Average daily app sessions grew 7.1% during the campaign
- During the campaign, Loyalty non-alcoholic category participation grew 4.5 percentage points versus last year
- During the campaign, Loyalty non-alcoholic category transactions grew 21% vs the pre-period
Working Together: RaceTrac × Stitch
Results matter. So does how you get there. And the joint retrospective made clear that this engagement went somewhere most vendor relationships don’t.
Justin Brodsky, RaceTrac’s campaign lead, put it directly: “We really, really appreciated your team’s proactivity on solutions when hurdles came. You guys always were able to come to the table… and it helped us make decisions quickly. We don’t see that out of all of our partners.”
The feeling was mutual — and structural. ‘Fuel Your Thirst’ was RaceTrac’s first major cross-functional project of this scale, bringing together their campaigns, app development, loyalty, in-store, and creative teams into a single coordinated activation. For a project that required so many stakeholders to move at that speed, the relationship between the teams had to function as one. And it did. As one RaceTrac team member put it at the retrospective: “It really didn’t feel like a client situation. It just felt like a team.”
What Comes Next
RaceTrac didn’t just launch a summer game. They built a foundation.
The architecture Stitch built is reusable and re-skinnable. The next activation — whether it’s a holiday game, a hot-food challenge, or something the team hasn’t dreamed up yet — starts with proven infrastructure, not a blank page. Katie Nikitin, RaceTrac’s marketing campaign strategy lead, said it best at the retrospective: “People are already buzzing about future games.” ‘Fuel Your Thirst’ was just the beginning.
RaceTrac is one of the largest privately-held convenience store and fuel retailers in the US. Stitch is a modern marketing services company helping brands build world-class marketing operations on Braze and Databricks.
