Living with a disability costs, on average, over £1,000 a month extra. Purpl set out to claw some of that back: exclusive discounts from hundreds of retailers, available only to people who can verify their disability status.
That word "verify" is where the difficulty lives. The whole platform hinges on checking something sensitive and personal, securely, without making eligible users jump through humiliating hoops. Too strict and you exclude the people it's for; too loose and retailers pull their discounts.
We built the platform from the ground up in Next.js, pulling content from two places: a headless CMS for the retailer offers and editorial content, and a custom API we built to handle accounts and the verification flow. Keeping verification in our own API — rather than bolting it onto the CMS — meant the sensitive data lived in exactly one place, with one set of access rules.
The designs came together in Figma with the Purpl team, and we built a component library in Storybook so the design system stayed consistent as the catalogue of retailers grew. Not exciting, but it's the difference between a site that holds together at fifty retailers and one that's a patchwork at five hundred.
Purpl launched with discounts from hundreds of retailers and has been growing since. Verified users get genuine money off the everyday cost of living with a disability, retailers trust that the discounts reach the right people, and the headless setup means Purpl's own team update content without calling us. Useful, working, and quietly getting on with it.
