Tag Technologies: a brand and a storefront, built from scratch
A group of entrepreneurs in Brunei had an idea for a business card that is tapped rather than handed over. They had the commercial side and early backing, and nobody who could build it. I delivered the identity, the web design and the build, and stayed through the year it became a registered company selling to both of Brunei's 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
The project came out of Brunei's student entrepreneurship scene, where I was studying and taking design and front-end work alongside it. A group a few years ahead of me had been circling an idea: NFC business cards, tapped against a phone to transfer contact details. The technology was cheap and proven elsewhere, and nobody in Brunei was selling it.
They had the commercial side covered and a handful of small investors interested. The gap was execution. I took the design and technical side of the whole thing, from the mark on the card to the checkout that sold it.
I held a stake and worked as an owner, not as someone billing hours. The design decisions carried commercial consequences and were mine to get wrong, which is the main way this project differs from client work.
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 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 much of business still moves on personal reputation, a site that looked like a side project would have ended the conversation before it started.
Finding out who would actually buy one
None of the three problems above could be answered from a desk, so the research ran in two directions at once.
The first was a segmentation. We grouped plausible buyers by how likely they were to want a card and what they could afford to spend: university students, senior students close to graduating and job hunting, lecturers and teachers, and working professionals who were still studying. We circulated flyers online, asked each group what they made of the product, and asked directly what they would pay for it. The answers varied enough between groups to be useful, and the launch pricing came out of that and not out of a margin calculation.
The more useful half came from attending in person. Brunei's startup scene is small and runs on a steady rota of entrepreneurship events, and we attended as many as we could get into, including the ones we were competing in. Those rooms held a closer match to the buyer than any student group: people who hand out cards constantly, run out at the worst moment, and have opinions about the ones they carry. We asked what they found awkward about exchanging contact details and let the answers set the priorities.
Two findings recurred often enough to change the design. People assumed a card like this required an app on both phones, which is the objection the hero copy exists to answer. And they would not reprint a whole run because one phone number changed, which is what pushed the offer towards an editable landing page instead of a printed object. Neither came from me. Both came from people explaining why they would not buy it.
What I did
Positioned it against paper
Competitor research turned up almost nobody local, so benchmarking the category would have told me nothing useful. The competitor that mattered was the printed business card: cheap, familiar, and something everyone already owns a box of. So the whole site argues against paper. 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
The same confusion surfaced in every buyer conversation: people assumed the card needed an app, or a subscription, or that it would eventually stop working. The hero had to settle that before anything else. "All your contact details, one tag away" set over a shot of the card meeting a phone carries the explanation without a paragraph of copy. Everything technical moved below the fold, where it reassures the people who look for it and stays out of the way of those who do not.
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 rather than the hardware
The first version of the offer was a card, and it converted poorly. Rebuilding it around what the buyer receives, a personalised landing page, a design matched to their branding, automations behind it, and support that does not expire, gave the purchase 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
An unexciting choice that held up. 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.
How it ended
By the end there was funding available to grow it into something larger, and that did not happen. The business did not fail commercially. The founders dispersed: I finished my studies and left Brunei, and the others moved abroad or returned to study. The company lost the people driving it. It still trades, slowly. I sold most of my stake and am still asked for an opinion occasionally.
It is worth recording accurately. The design work held up and the company outlasted everyone who built it. What it did not survive was the whole founding team leaving at once.
What I took from it
Most design work begins after somebody else has decided what the product is. This one did not, and the difference showed in the decisions. Knowing what a lost sale actually cost changed what went on a page: sections stopped being designed because a site is expected to have them, and started being designed because a specific person was getting stuck at a specific point.
The second is that owning the build is what made iteration possible. With no handoff and no ticket queue, a section that was not working could be rewritten the same evening it was identified. That remains how I work, and it is why I take both halves of the job.
