Overview

‍During the construction of a new subway tunnel, running from 68th to 95th streets in Manhattan, many small businesses on 2nd Avenue had closed. Those that remained open reported a 30% decline in revenue since construction started.

The Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, in partnership with the City Council of New York and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), wanted to help 2nd Avenue businesses that had taken a hit from the lack of walk-in customers who avoided 2nd Avenue altogether because of the constant construction.

Blood & Treasure was asked to design and develop a hyper-local technology platform on iOS and Android to attract customers back into merchant stores within the 2nd Avenue construction zone.

Branded as The Second Avenue Shopper, the app had the following goals:

• Inform the public of events of interest taking place along 2nd Avenue on the Upper East Side
• Update daily specials from local 2nd Avenue merchants from 63rd to 97th streets who are impacted by the subway construction
• Attract foot traffic to 2nd Avenue stores

To make the app useful to both merchants and consumers, we needed to build in multiple features including video uploads, deals, push notifications, analytics and map functionality on a limited budget.

This is easy enough to do on one platform when budget is not a major concern.

Achieving it on both iOS and Android simultaneously presented a challenge in that both operating systems work a little differently. It took some tweaking to get the user experience feeling like it was consistent across both platforms.

We were also racing to get the iOS app approved by Apple in time for the public launch which we luckily managed to do.

New York City merchants are tough customers. We learned the value of having robust and flexible software development processes in place from the beginning. In particular we credit our Scrum process for making it easy to absorb client changes into our workflow, and deliver the project on time and within a very tight budget.