Lessons from a viral ice cream truck in Japan. 🍦

By Sarah McBride

On November 1st, a select group of users in Japan opened Zenly to find an ice cream truck driving around Tokyo. 3 days and a few laps around the country later, the truck unlocked to unveil Zenly World — an online merch store that we built for our most loving and engaged Japanese users.

The mysterious truck spilled over to social media as people screen shotted and screen recorded the new pin on their map. When the store unlocked, everyone wanted to know who was going to buy the $14,000 5ft giant popsicle art piece (someone did actually buy it). On TikTok, the Zenly hashtag in Japanese surpassed 22 million views in just a few days. The truck also caused a spike in active users and friend requests, and grew the following of our Japan Twitter account by 4x.

We brought this project from conception to merch-selling ice cream truck execution in the space of 4 months. What follows is an overview of the challenges we navigated and the lessons we learned from building a viral brand experience directly in Zenly. 🍦

Zenly has a history of building joy-inducing user experiences. Someone once described Zenly as “unwrapping a cool lemon pop on a hot summer day”. Every tap, transition, share card, line of copy has been crafted to create joy. So we knew that building a merch store, and putting it on the map, should feel no different.

There were 3 distinct experiences we had to build for:

Putting an ice cream truck on the map — The truck would first appear in Zenly with a countdown timer above while driving around Japan. 3 days later, the timer would disappear and tapping the truck would open a native web view in the app.
Building an online merch store — Once the truck unlocked, the native web view would load a custom Shopify store selling Zenly clothing and accessories.
Coordinating fulfilment — Once an item was purchased, we had to coordinate with our fulfilment center in Japan to send the package out to zenly.world customers, and create a physical unboxing experience linked to the digital experience.

The anti-ecom experience 🌐

How it started vs how it’s going. 💖

This project required building an entire web experience from scratch, so we started with the online store. The core of the brief was to build an immersive and fun experience for users who already know and love Zenly — not about building a dialled e-commerce experience. To bring this anti-ecommerce experience to life, we were fortunate to work with one of our longtime partners, Makata.

The core of the design was inspired by the popsicle on a warm summer’s day analogy. Ice cream is our middle name and our app icon. We had toyed with an ice cream truck design in the past, but never found a place for it. This was the perfect opportunity to finally bring the truck to life.

The ice cream truck’s time to shine. ✨

The store was built as a custom Shopify site, with the world view built in three.js. Although the majority of the traffic to the site would come through the native web view initially, we wanted to build a site that could live independently when accessed directly via the zenly.world URL. That meant building a website that felt as native as possible to the app experience when loaded through the web view, worked great on desktop, and was responsive on mobile.

Putting ice cream on the map 🍦