The Untold Story Behind Bumble's Rumble—Our Online White Elephant Game

This December, the Designology team decided to unveil something that we’ve kept pretty much under wraps for the past 3 years. Check it out at bumblesrumble.com and on Insta at @bumblesrumble. And for those that are interested, read on for the full story of how Bumble’s Rumble came to be!

In November of 2020, during the worst part of the pandemic, we came up with a crazy idea that we casually mentioned to a favorite client to see if it might make their holiday season feel just a little more connected and fun. The idea was an online multiplayer “white elephant” gift swap game. It was just a concept, unnamed at first, barely even mocked up when we first offered it, and unlike anything we’d ever done before, and when they said “yes”, it terrified all of us. Version 1.0 was constructed and deployed, start to finish, in less than one month. We named it Bumble’s Rumble, after the Abominable Snowman character (nickname: Bumble) from the original Rudolph cartoon.

After its launch, Bumble’s Rumble sat untouched for a year. We thought it was once and done—something we’d built in a rush for a single deployment, a fun pet project but not much else. Then, when our client inquired about it again the next year (since the world was still in “work from home” mode), and we discovered the news had spread to a few more teams, we knew we had to dust Bumble off at least one more time.

This year, we’re taking what has been pretty much a “behind the scenes” pet project of ours and opening it up to everyone. If you’re part of a distributed team, family, or friend group and you think you could have some fun with an online gift swap platform, have at it! We updated the UX and created a self-service mode that we’re making 100% free to anyone who’d like to try it out. If you have suggestions about things we could do to make this more enjoyable or effective, feel free to pass them our way—and in the meantime, we hope our little Bumble can make a few of you smile. From all of us here at Designology, we hope you have a wonderful (and connected) holiday season!