HOOD Holidays 2025
6 days. $7M in luxury prizes. 1 content POV to take it to 100.
920K participants · +200K new Gold subscribers · 7.84M social impressions
Overview
HOOD Holidays was Robinhood’s 2025 flagship holiday promotion: a six-day, advent calendar–style experience designed to reward customers with exclusive gifts ranging from Rolex watches and a Porsche to crypto rewards. Each day, customers could opt in to receive one gift from that day’s lineup, with four days exclusive to Robinhood Gold members and two available to all customers.
As the lead Content Designer on a three-person core team alongside Product Design and Product Management, I partnered in shaping the experience from initial concept through launch—owning content strategy, interaction design decisions, and end-to-end content execution across 100+ screens.
The Challenge
We had just three months to design and ship a fully bespoke promotional experience from scratch. The event needed to feel iconic, celebratory, and highly differentiated from Robinhood’s typical incentive structures while still driving measurable business impact.
At the same time, the experience had to support:
- Nearly 1M participants engaging simultaneously during peak days
- 100+ unique product surfaces across six event days
- Intense legal and compliance requirements spanning sweepstakes, subscription, IP, and crypto regulations
- Operational constraints that prevented gifts from being delivered immediately after claim
The biggest UX challenge emerged from that final constraint: users could “opt in” to claim a gift immediately upon the gift lineup announcement, but fulfillment and “reveal” of a user’s specific gift required manual verification—a 12–20 hour process.
This created a potentially disappointing gap between anticipation and reward.
I aimed to make the waiting period feel emotionally engaging and intentional, not frustrating.
Key Decision 1: Create Anticipation
Engineering established early that gift claims and gift reveals had to be separate states.
I reframed this built-in friction as a design opportunity. I developed a content strategy centered around anticipation: making the daily gift lineup reveal feel nearly as exciting as the eventual gift unwrap.
Each day’s gift lineup reveal opened with content designed to create a sense of buildup and hype.
This “drumroll” moment maintained excitement while reinforcing a simple promise: if you’re here seeing the reveal, you’re guaranteed a gift later today.
The lineup reveals became major moments of excitement both in-product and on social, transforming a backend limitation into a core emotional beat of the experience.
Key Decision 2: Build a Scalable Content Framework
This experience spanned more than 100 screens and 40+ unique prizes—consistency was critical.
I established three guiding content principles early in development:
- Inspire delight through playfulness and surprise
- Create momentum through anticipation and reward
- Keep value instantly understandable
Robinhood's in-product voice leans informational in complex financial contexts. HOOD Holidays allowed me to leverage a more playful, emotionally expressive side of the brand without sacrificing clarity.
To scale this voice across dozens of prize reveal states, I used AI as an ideation tool during early exploration.
I generated broad sets of options, then curated, rewrote, and refined final content to ensure every surface met Robinhood's voice and quality standards.
This allowed me to scale creative variation efficiently while maintaining a high editorial bar.
Key Decision 3: Reward Curiosity With "Sneak Peeks"
One of my proudest contributions: pitching and designing a "sneak peek" system.
Above all, HOOD Holidays was meant to inspire delight. Rewarding exploration maintains momentum even when there isn't a gift to unwrap.
If users tried to unwrap a gift early, they were met with playful content acknowledging that they'd been caught peeking. Instead of ending the interaction there, I advocated for an incentive loop: referring a friend unlocked an early clue about the next day's prizes in the form of a riddle.
These riddles could hint at prizes gated behind Gold members-only days, naturally linking desire with upgrade motivation for non-Gold users.
This served multiple goals simultaneously:
- Encouraged curiosity and exploration
- Increased referrals
- Boosted repeat engagement
- Created compelling upgrade moments for non-Gold users
The riddles became a major driver of community engagement, generating discussion threads across X as users collaboratively decoded clues and speculated about upcoming prizes.
Cross-Functional Leadership
Beyond content execution, I served as a connective partner across multiple disciplines.
I worked closely with Product Design and Product Management during concept exploration, helping shape user journeys, information architecture, and wireframes that we successfully presented to Robinhood’s CEO.
I also led daily content reviews with 15+ Legal and Compliance stakeholders across multiple regulatory domains, creating an ongoing decision-making forum for resolving ambiguity quickly without sacrificing product velocity or UX quality.
This structure helped us maintain clarity, compliance, and consistency across all in-product and external surfaces.
Outcome
920K+ unique participants across 6 days
Highest-attended live event in Robinhood history
200K new Robinhood Gold subscriptions
60K above finance target
7.84M social impressions
Content cited as a key driver of social media virality
496K participants on Day 5
Captured the attention of nearly half a million users simultaneously
Reflection
When you're building something from the ground up, the only limitation is your imagination… and what engineering can reasonably create from scratch in three months.
The largest product constraint I felt was the gap between gift claim and gift reveal. While I believe the content strategy successfully transformed that delay into anticipation, the end-to-end experience still required users to internalize a less intuitive mental model than an immediate reward flow.
If revisiting the experience, I would explore ways to reduce or eliminate this operational gap altogether so the emotional payoff feels even more seamless.