Sole Lucky

Introduction

Sole Lucky reimagines how people get access to limited sneaker releases. Instead of competing against bots and resellers on the secondary market, users enter raffles for a chance to buy at retail price, and a points system rewards repeat participation with better odds over time.

The Goal

Design an app where users feel like they're getting a fair shot at exclusive releases, not just another chance to lose to automated buying.

The Challenge

Sneaker raffles have a trust problem. Most platforms don't explain how winners are chosen, bots dominate high-demand drops, and resale prices push casual fans out of the market entirely. The design challenge was building a raffle experience transparent enough that users could trust the odds, wrapped in a UI clean enough to compete with retail-grade apps.

The Process

David started with a quantitative survey to understand where existing raffle and resale apps were failing users, then moved into a competitive audit of the sneaker resale market. From there he built the brand, sketched early concepts, and worked through wireframes, prototypes, and a round of usability testing before refining the final UI.

The Research

Competitive Audit & Survey

After evaluating StockX, GOAT, eBay, and Foot Locker, David pulled the strengths and weaknesses of each into the research and used them to Sole Lucky's advantage. David also ran a quantitative survey with 20 participants to understand pain points with existing sneaker raffle and resale apps, covering screener questions, pain points, and open feedback.

User Personas

Design Validation

Sketches → Wireframes → Low-Fidelity Prototype

Early sketches kept the design anchored to what stakeholders cared about most: a fast, low-friction entry flow. Wireframes translated that into screen-level decisions, and the low-fidelity prototype focused on making the raffle entry and points system feel effortless before testing it with real users.

Usability Study

Brand & UI System

Typography

Turret Road: Display and headline use only (logo, section titles, hero moments). A condensed sans with a technical, slightly industrial character; works well at large sizes but gets harder to read in long-form text, so it stays out of body copy entirely.

JetBrains Mono: UI body, labels, and all functional/data text. Sole Lucky is full of numeric, functional data: prices, sizes, points, entry counts, deadlines. A mono face makes that information feel deliberate and legible rather than decorative, and reinforces an agile product feel over lifestyle-brand polish.

Hi-Fidelity

The final designs added expanded homepage categories (men's, women's, kids') and built in the points-based reward system that gives users better raffle odds the more they participate.

Going Forward

Impact

Sole Lucky gives users like Ryan a fair, bot-resistant shot at retail-priced releases instead of competing against automated buying, and gives users like Carlos a faster, family-friendly shopping experience with the payment flexibility and category range he needed. The points system rewards continued participation with better odds over time, rather than treating every entry as an equal coin flip regardless of history.

What David Learned

Designing for a points-based access system meant every product decision had to account for perceived fairness, not just usability. Ryan and Carlos needed different things from the app, but both needed to trust that the raffle mechanic itself wasn't rigged. That's a harder design problem than clean UI alone solves.

Next Steps

Want to know more about David Rivas? You can also see his skills or check out Battery Trader.