Tag Technologies: a brand and a storefront, built from scratch
A group of entrepreneurs in Brunei had an idea for a business card you tap instead of hand over. They had the business side and early backing. They needed someone to build the thing. I did the identity, the web design and the build, and stayed through the year it turned into a registered company selling to Brunei's two telecom operators.
Tag Technologies is a Bruneian company selling NFC business cards: a physical card that opens a personalised landing page when tapped against a phone, so contact details transfer without either person installing an app.
I designed the brand identity, the marketing site and the ordering experience, and built it on WordPress and WooCommerce. I also designed the social content and the material used to pitch the business.
The company sold over 1,000 cards in its first year. Its clients include both of Brunei's telecom operators, DST and Progresif, along with Brunei Innovation Lab and Shell LiveWIRE Brunei. DST's order alone replaced the printed business cards of more than 600 staff.
How it started
I was studying in Brunei and doing design and front-end work alongside it. A group of entrepreneurship students a few years ahead of me had been circling an idea: NFC business cards. Tap a card against a phone and your details land in it. The technology was cheap and already proven elsewhere. Nobody in Brunei was selling it.
They had the commercial side covered and a handful of small investors interested. What the idea did not have was anyone who could actually build it. That is what they came to me for, and it is the role I took: the technical and design side of the whole thing, from the mark on the card to the checkout that sold it.
I held a stake and worked on it as an owner rather than as someone billing hours, which is why this project reads differently to the client work elsewhere on this site. The decisions were mine to get wrong.
The problem
Selling something people have never seen is a different job to selling something people already want. Three things were working against us.
Nobody was searching for it
There was no demand to capture, only demand to create. Every visitor arrived with no mental model of what an NFC card was or why they would pay for one. The site had to teach and sell in the same scroll.
Two audiences, one page
A freelancer buying a single card and a company ordering hundreds for its staff want completely different things. The freelancer wants to see it work. The company wants bulk pricing, custom branding, and an answer to what happens when someone leaves. Splitting them into separate funnels was not realistic at our size, so one page had to carry both without feeling like a compromise to either.
Zero credibility
We were students. No brand, no track record, no reviews. In a market the size of Brunei, where a lot of business still moves on personal reputation, a site that looked like a side project would have ended the conversation before it started.
What I did
Positioned it against paper, not against other NFC vendors
Competitor research turned up almost nobody local, so benchmarking the category would have told me nothing useful. The real competitor was the printed business card: cheap, familiar, and something everyone already owns a box of. So the whole site argues against paper rather than against other NFC companies. The three reasons on the homepage, easy to use, cost effective, eco friendly, are the three places a printed card loses. That framing did more for conversion than any visual decision on the project.
Made the product legible in one glance
Talking to potential buyers, the same confusion came up every time: people assumed it needed an app, or a subscription, or that it would stop working. The hero had to answer that before anything else. "All your contact details, one tag away" over a shot of the card meeting a phone does the whole explanation without a paragraph of copy. Everything technical moved below the fold, where it reassures the people who go looking for it and stays out of the way of the people who don't.
Built an identity that could sit next to a client's own branding
The card is a surface a customer prints their own logo onto, so the Tag identity had to be confident enough to be trusted and quiet enough to disappear behind someone else's brand. I built the mark from circuit traces, which reads as technology without saying the word, and paired it with a blue to magenta gradient that photographs well on a dark card and holds up when printed small. The kit was made to be handed over: logo variants, colour values, type, so people other than me could keep producing material without it drifting.
Sold the outcome, not the hardware
The first version of the offer was a card. It converted poorly, because a card by itself is a novelty. Rebuilding the offer around what the buyer actually receives, a personalised landing page, a design matched to their branding, automations behind it, support that does not expire, turned a one-off purchase into something with a reason to exist after the first tap. That is the change I would point to first if someone asked what moved the numbers.
Shipped it on WordPress and WooCommerce
Not the most interesting choice, and the right one. It had to be maintainable by whoever was around after I stopped touching it, it had to take real orders on day one, and it had to be cheap to run for a company that had not sold anything yet. WooCommerce handled ordering, variants and the bulk enquiries from corporate buyers. The build is responsive throughout, because in Brunei this was going to be opened on a phone almost every time.
Kept the brand alive after launch
A site with no traffic sells nothing. I designed the Instagram content and the promotional runs: launch announcements, product explainers, price and feature cards. The same identity had to work at 1080 square with a thumb moving past it, which is a different problem to a web page. Design was the only marketing budget we had, so it had to work as marketing.
The circuit motif from the logo becomes the background pattern, and gold joins the palette as a second accent because the blue to magenta gradient disappears against a dark photograph.
What happened
The company registered in Brunei and traded properly, with the storefront as its main sales channel. It sold over 1,000 cards in its first year, starting with small vendors and moving up as the work became visible.
DSTBrunei's largest telecom operator. Replaced the printed business cards of more than 600 staff, so the design had to reproduce at volume against someone else's brand guidelines.
ProgresifThe country's other telecom operator, roughly 300 cards. The second carrier is never sold on novelty. They had seen the first deployment working.
Brunei Innovation LabThe government-backed programme supporting local tech startups. Useful proof for a product whose whole argument is that it belongs in a modern organisation.
Shell LiveWIRE BruneiThe national programme for young entrepreneurs, both a client and the place the business won its pitches.
Over 1,000 cards in year one. A 600+ card order from DST. Both of Brunei's national telecom operators as clients, from an idea with no name on it.
Brand, site and store: one person, start to finish.
BSM Disrupt, third place
We entered BSM Disrupt, Brunei's startup pitch competition, in December 2022 and took third with a BND $1,000 prize. We also went through Shell LiveWIRE Brunei's programme, which did not end in a placing but produced the introductions and the follow up that mattered more at that stage. Both ran on decks and boards I designed.
By the end there was real money on the table to grow it into something larger. It did not happen, and not because the business failed. I finished my studies and left Brunei, the others moved to different countries or went back to studying, and the thing lost the people who were pushing it. It still trades, just slowly. I sold most of my stake and still get asked for an opinion now and then.
That is the honest ending, and I would rather write it than a tidier one. The design work stood up. The company outlasted everyone who built it. What it did not survive was all of us leaving at once.
What I took from it
Most of my work starts after somebody else has decided what the thing is. This one did not, and the difference showed up in the design decisions. Knowing exactly what a lost sale cost us changed what I put on a page: I stopped designing sections because a site is supposed to have them, and started designing them because a specific person was getting stuck at a specific point.
The second thing is that owning the build is what made the iterating possible. There was no handoff and no ticket queue, so a section that was not working could be rewritten the same evening it was identified. That is still how I prefer to work, and it is why I do both halves of the job.
