Mailchimp is a marketing platform. As a tool, it helps elevate small businesses and gives them the ability to reach new and existing customers. Which is great. But. We also believe it's important– crucial, even–  to take a break from that work from time-to-time. Some of our best ideas come when we're out on walks, gazing into the sunset (indirectly, of course) or playing a game. For that reason, our small in-house team set out to make our third game for our customers (and anyone else that happens to find them).

From the start, we knew we wanted to do mini-golf. Our team had fond memories of playing Nabsico's Candy Stand web games back in the nascent days of the internet. Our hope was to make something equally snackable and joyful. It just so happened that other folks on our design team had already created a fictitious brand for a recent campaign called "Corner Dumplings". It featured an adorable dumpling character, and had a nicely defined set of brand elements to boot. We combined that brand with our mini-golf idea, created about 20 different prototypes, and finally winnowed them down to the 9 hole adventure that you can play today.

Success! Within the first month, our game had ~3 million impressions on the iOS app store (over 3 times what the Mailchimp Mobile app saw in that same time period). We won Site of the Day on Awwwards.com and a handful of other interactive design awards.

More importantly though, we received reports from parents, grandparents, marketing professionals, and elementary school kids from all over the place that they "loved the dumpling game, and please don't ever stop making it."