Jack Spades was a product-and-creative agency I co-founded with my friend Rustin Coburn. Surf Air, a Los Angeles private-aviation membership, was our first client. Their highest-margin product, group memberships at over five thousand a month, had no working acquisition engine, and earlier corporate gifting attempts had fallen flat. They told us the conversion rate from anyone who actually tried the service was over eighty percent, so the plan was simple: get the right people on a plane.

We built the campaign around the unboxing moment, "one for you, two to share," a physical package holding three complimentary boarding passes that invited a recipient to fly and to bring colleagues, feeding the in-house sales team warm, qualified conversations. I did both halves of the work. As the data engineer I built an in-house lead-sourcing tool that identified the target buyer, tech executives, through deep ethnographic and psychographic research. As the designer I designed the package, the letter, and the tickets themselves, matching destinations to the recipient: San Francisco for an LA tech worker, Lake Tahoe for the second-home crowd.

We started by flying out to LA as secret shoppers and going through the whole first-time-flyer experience ourselves, Pilatus PC-12, Los Angeles to San Francisco and back in a day, before we designed a single thing.