Kristina Carrillo-Bucaram (‘FullyRaw Kristina’) is the most popular influencer in the raw vegan community, with millions of enthusiastic followers on social media. A vegan member of the CitrusBits team who was already a Kristina follower was fortunate enough to have a chance conversation with Kristina at a local vegan event. One discussion led to another, and CitrusBits was soon hired to bring Kristina’s innovative content and the FullyRaw lifestyle to iOS mobile devices.
As the subject matter expert, Kristina would focus on providing exceptional content for the app, while CitrusBits would design and develop the perfect mobile experience to engage, delight, and grow Kristina’s follower base.
Given the abundance of FullyRaw content spread across all of Kristina’s various social and web platforms, we knew the mobile app had to bring all of that wonderful content together in an easy-to-use, organized app — free of clutter and confusion. A simple and intuitive interface was designed to showcase her feast of content: recipes, videos, shopping lists, and challenges and more.
To make the app an interactive experience above and beyond Kristina’s existing platforms, we added a “Challenges” feature. This premium feature allows users to browse, accept, and track their progress on Kristina’s innovative nutrition/diet challenges, which can be completed by hitting specific milestones and daily missions.
The enormous breadth of rich, interactive content in the app required us to consider how to get all that content into the app without jeopardizing the user experience and app performance. Our development team tackled this challenge by first optimizing the multimedia content and software architecture to provide a lively and responsive experience, free of screen lag, delays, freezing, or stream buffering.
Finally, we built a simple-to-use web-based admin panel, enabling Kristina to add new content to the app in real time — without having to push new app updates to the App Store.
Within a week of FullyRaw’s debut on the App Store, the app skyrocketed to the #1 paid app slot in the Food & Drink category and became a top 10 paid app across all categories. The FullyRaw app was awarded the 2018 W3 Gold award for mobile apps in the Food & Drink category.
For many of Kristina’s followers, the app has become their “go-to” resource and the essential way to engage with Kristina’s content and practice the FullyRaw lifestyle.
