A mobile app.
3 months.
Zero room to fail.
Design Miami needed to launch a world-class mobile experience in time for their flagship fair — half the time a project like this normally takes. Their legacy data architecture made it nearly impossible. The Zig made it happen.
The world's leading
forum for collectible design.
Design Miami holds live events each year including the in prestigious Art Basel based in Switzerland. The event connects high-net worth individuals with exhibitors who showcase one-of-a-kind art pieces priced from $5,000 to $250,000+.
Their flagship event at Miami Beach attracted more than 40 exhibitors and over 31,000 visitors, drawing prominent art critics, curators, and celebrities including Serena Williams, Rihanna, and Pharrell.
Already one of the most prestigious collectible design fairs in the world, Design Miami wanted to continue growing their brand and engage a larger audience and bring a unique curated experience to the Art Basel Fair. They partnered with The Zig to take on the scope and complexity with a delivery target within 3 months.
Three constraints.3 month window.
Design Miami’s technical team, led by Brian Johnson, set out to build the app within a fixed timeline tied to a major event. The challenge wasn’t a lack of direction, it was the scale of what needed to be delivered within a compressed window.
The team was working against three overlapping constraints: a tight deadline, an ambitious product vision, and a complex, evolving data environment.
The team recognized the need for a partner with both mobile delivery experience and deep data engineering expertise to execute effectively under these conditions.
The release needed to coincide with Design Miami’s marquee event, establishing a hard delivery boundary from day one.
The application needed to support a wide set of user interactions immediately, requiring careful prioritization and sequencing within the available timeframe.
The app needed to stay in sync with a live, frequently updated dataset powering the website. This included handling non-relational data patterns and maintaining consistency before and during the event, even under variable connectivity.
The Zig was easy to work with, adaptable to our project as it changed, and dynamic enough to solve each new challenge that came up. Our app received a few thousand installs, which is really significant for our audience, and included significant innovations for our market, like making high-end art pieces available for purchase online with transparent pricing. But without The Zig, we may not have completed the project on time at all.
The right partner
for a complex launch.
The Design Miami team evaluated partners carefully. They needed more than technical execution, they needed a team with product judgment, delivery discipline, and the engineering depth to handle both the mobile experience and the data layer behind it.
“They were big picture thinkers who could see this project from the business’ perspective, and translate all of our ideas about the app into functionality we could realistically build.”
“They didn’t just say ‘yes’ to everything we wanted to do. They were just as invested as we were in making this a success for our business, and helped us trim and prioritize our wishlist to something achievable.”
“They had built great mobile apps before, and had developers and designers in-house who could deliver what we needed within the timeline. Critically, they had engineers who could solve our data integration challenge. We didn’t have the internal capacity to take this on.”
Solving the
data integration problem.
Design Miami's WordPress database used MySQL in a non-relational way — making it nearly impossible to serve a live mobile app reliably. The Zig reverse-engineered the architecture and built a custom migration pipeline that solved it permanently.
Sourcing data from WordPress presented compounding challenges: CMS users don't directly manipulate the MySQL DB, the architecture is non-traditional and not optimized for mobile, and stored procedures updated records in a non-deterministic way when combined with third-party plugins.
Complex stored procedures · Third-party plugins
proprietary structure
Ad hoc backfill systems
ready for mobile
The Zig was willing to be flexible as requirements constantly changed. They dug deep into our goals for the app and how we wanted our end users to interact with it and helped us define a scope that made sense.
Structure enabled delivery
within a fixed timeline.
The Zig began development early, with scoping and prioritization continuing in parallel. This approach allowed the team to make steady progress while refining requirements, ensuring the application was delivered within the three-month window without compromising quality.
The Zig worked closely with the Design Miami team to align on priorities and define a realistic set of features for the initial release. Regular check-ins ensured clarity on scope, sequencing, and delivery expectations from the outset.
Development began immediately on core functionality while remaining features were refined in parallel. The system was designed to integrate with multiple data sources, supporting flexible data ingestion and transformation as requirements evolved.
In the final phase, the team focused on stability, performance, and issue resolution. During the live event, they ensured the application remained available and continued to synchronize data in near real-time, even under challenging connectivity conditions.
Our system of record is a WordPress database that uses MySQL, but not in a relational way. The queries to extract that data get pretty complex and don't perform very well. This was going to be a pretty big pain point for the mobile app. If The Zig hadn't been involved, I'm not sure we could have gotten the data into the app in the format we needed.
Thousands of downloads.
Current, past, and upcoming events — all in one place for returning collectors and first-time visitors.
Full profiles and item detail for every exhibitor and the pieces they showcased — searchable and browsable.
Instantly pull up expanded information on any item in the fair by scanning a QR code at the booth.
A notification-driven feature presenting deals to consider and activities to attend during the live event.
A first for this market — high-end art available for purchase online with transparent pricing, directly from the app.
3D tours and new editorial content extending the fair experience well beyond the live event dates.
"The Zig was easy to work with, adaptable to our project as it changed, and dynamic enough to solve each new challenge that came up. Our app received a few thousand installs — which is really significant for our audience — and included significant innovations for our market, like making high-end art pieces available for purchase online with transparent pricing. But without The Zig, we may not have completed the project on time at all."
What we actually delivered.
- Solved the data integration challenge by creating a custom C# migration tool to move data from the website to the app
- Brought clarity to the project's lack of scope to successfully launch the mobile app in time for Design Miami's marquee live event
- Provided Phase 3 live support during the fair itself, keeping data updated in near-real-time as new listings came in
- Enabled a significant market first — transparent online purchasing of high-end art pieces directly from the app
Ready to ship something
that doesn't exist yet?
We've solved data problems that were supposed to be impossible and delivered products that weren't supposed to be on time. Let's talk about yours.