DIBS Parking

Every game day, fans circle the blocks around Hard Rock Stadium and overpay for official lots while driveways five minutes from the gate sit empty.

DIBS saw a marketplace in that gap: drivers reserve a guaranteed spot before they leave home, usually 50 to 70 percent cheaper, and homeowners turn empty space into income. The founders had the idea, a working prototype and a launch window: football season and then the 2026 World Cup. What they did not have was a brand, a system or a design. We joined at day zero, before the first screen, as the only designers next to two founders who engineer everything themselves.

A peer-to-peer marketplace is two products that must trust each other before either works. Drivers feared arriving at a spot that does not exist. Hosts feared strangers on their property. Every decision that followed, verification, walking distance shown up front, QR check-in, reviews, host protection, was about earning that trust on both sides at once.

The established players in parking feel institutional: garages, meters, enforcement.

DIBS had to read as the opposite, community-first and unmistakably Miami. The mark we drew is a pictogram of a car tucked into a hexagon rotated four degrees, a shape that also reads as a D. Electric purple carries the tech credibility a marketplace needs to be trusted with a car and a payment. Sun yellow cuts through it with the city’s warmth. Cabinet Grotesk sets the headlines, Satoshi runs the interface where clarity under pressure matters more than personality, and the graphic language is rounded pills, rings, arrows that point at a spot, and a parking-grid layout that scales from a stadium banner to a push notification. Photography is black and white with the purple and yellow graphics laid on top, so the brand reads before the picture does.

Two founders engineer everything from our Figma files, so the design system had to be infrastructure, not a style guide.

We built a token-based library: semantic colours in light and dark, spacing and type styles, and more than a hundred component sets, from buttons and inputs to marketplace pieces the founders would otherwise invent twice: spot cards, event cards, the booking timer, the earnings breakdown, the payout wallet, driver and host navigation. Every token is named to map one to one onto a CSS variable in the codebase, so a change in Figma is a change in the app. Icons are the 2,500-glyph Solar library extended with custom DIBS icons for what parking needs and no icon set has.

Almost half of all bookings happen on event day, on a phone, in a hurry.

The driver flow is built for that: search by venue, see the exact spot with walking minutes and price before any tap, pay with Apple Pay or Google Pay, guest checkout allowed, and receive a QR code. In December 2025 the same flow learned neighbourhood parking: an Events / Daily switch with day and night passes in Wynwood and Coconut Grove, no second app. Trust closes the loop: hosts verified before they list, a QR that confirms check-in on both sides, ratings with tags a fan can tap in a hurry, and Tap to Pay for the driver who pulls up without a booking.

Hosts near stadiums are homeowners, not operators.

Their side is a guided property wizard with ID and proof-of-residency verification, listing per event or for a whole season in one pass, automatic event listing with a minimum price, a weekly schedule for daily parking, reservations, and an earnings dashboard. DIBS handles payment and support and pays hosts the day after the event; the dashboard makes that visible, because a host who can see what a driveway earns lists again. The web app carries the same wizard for hosts who sign up at a desk, and Tap to Pay lets a host take a card on their phone from a driver who never booked.

Supply is won on the street and demand on search.

We took the marketing site through three rounds as the product widened, with SEO templates for every venue and event, and that is where organic search and now ChatGPT referrals land first. Door hangers carry a unique QR code per sales rep, signs say “Call DIBS on this spot”, a roll-up banner walked F1 Miami fans through booking, and a splash animation opens every session. The iOS app launched in March 2025, app 2.0 in January 2026, the World Cup came to Hard Rock in the summer, and the fall 2026 expansion took DIBS from one stadium to twenty-six across some twenty US markets. Same system, five platforms, still shipping.