Applied
Engineering
Results
samuel-torres.com
Role
End-to-end ownership of a national step-count campaign: DNS and subdomain setup, the public frontend, the daily-registration backend, evidence validation, transactional email, and the admin export the client used to pick winners.
Core stack
WordPress · PHP · MySQL · Custom subdomain (eccowalk.ecco.com) · Live community counter · Evidence validation pipeline · Excel export
Context
ECCO ran The ECCO Walk, a 7-day community step challenge: each participant picked an ambassador, registered their steps once a day with photo evidence, and the top performers per ambassador — 7 winners each — got a pair of ECCO shoes and an invitation to the closing event. None of that is hard to describe. It's hard to keep running for seven straight days without breaking in public. A community counter that's wrong even once loses the room watching it. The one-per-day rule only works if the day boundary is Mexico City time, not the server's clock or whatever timezone a participant's phone thinks it's in. Every submission arrives as a photo someone took of their own phone screen, so it has to be received, checked, and only then added to a total everyone can see. And none of that traffic was steady — every time an ambassador posted a story, the site took a spike, not a trickle.
What I did
Stood up the WordPress micrositio on its own subdomain, eccowalk.ecco.com, coordinating DNS and the pointing against the client's corporate domain. A short-lived campaign with bursty traffic doesn't share a destination with the brand's e-commerce — a bad spike on the walk site should never be able to reach checkout.
Built the daily "Registra tu día" form and the evidence-upload flow, with a validation pipeline that checks each submission before its steps are added to the total — nothing counts on upload alone.
Built the community counter and each participant's own running total, streak and completed-days tracking, enforcing one registration per person per day inside a Mexico City time window — not the server's clock, not the participant's device.
Transactional campaign email, an admin panel with the full participant table, and an Excel export that became the actual input the client used to choose the 7 winners per ambassador. Closed the loop coordinating with the campaign's ambassadors and influencers — the point where the backend met the campaign's real operation.
The live-rename episode
Mid-challenge, with the counter already running in public, the client asked to rename the campaign — from "The ECCO Walk" to "10,000 pasos" — in the site's copy, the logo, and the counter's own label, without stopping registration or resetting the accumulated total. I updated the copy, logo and counter label across the WordPress templates and made a small, scoped database migration for the campaign-name field, leaving the step-count tables and the running total untouched. The counter kept counting through the rename. That's the difference between shipping a site and operating a system a live campaign depends on.
Result
Sep 3
72,672
Sep 6
726,255
Sep 10 (close)
3,532,137
The community counter held through a roughly 48× jump in a single week — 72,672 steps on September 3, 726,255 by September 6, 3,532,137 at close on September 10 — without the public total ever going inconsistent. One single day of registrations alone reached 102,260 steps. The campaign was amplified by a roster of ambassadors and influencers; the totals and reach they reported on their own accounts are theirs, not a measurement of this system.
Evidence from the live site and the event
Real screenshots from the live site, and photos from the closing event in Polanco.
The community counter at close: 3,532,137 steps.
The same counter mid-campaign, on September 6: 726,255 steps.
The daily "Registra tu día" form participants used to submit steps and evidence.
Confirmation screen after registering: streak, days completed, and running total — this is the single day that reached 102,260 steps.
The public rules page: one registration per day, seven consecutive days, a shoe and an event invitation for the top performers per ambassador.
The ECCO letters installation at the closing event in Polanco.
The welcome kit handed out at the event.
Short version (portfolio card)
A WordPress micrositio on its own subdomain, running a 7-day community step challenge end to end: daily registration with evidence validation, a live community counter, transactional email, and the admin export the client used to pick 7 winners per ambassador. Mid-campaign, renamed the entire challenge live — copy, logo, and counter label — without stopping registration or resetting the total. The counter held through a ~48× jump in one week, closing at 3.5M community steps.
Resume / LinkedIn bullets
- Built and operated, solo, a WordPress-based community challenge platform on its own subdomain — DNS, frontend, backend and admin — for a national retail campaign.
- Designed a live community step counter with daily evidence validation and a Mexico City-scoped one-per-day rule, holding consistent through a ~48× traffic jump in a single week.
- Renamed an entire live campaign — copy, logo, counter label, and a scoped database migration — mid-challenge, without stopping registration or resetting the accumulated total.