Congratulations to the Forge 2026 Torchie Awards winners

The annual Braze Torchie Awards recognize extraordinary efforts in marketing by leaders in connection with customer engagement. We’re delighted to share our 2026 roster of award winners, representing a spectrum of creativity and innovation in consumer communications. For the full information on all of our wonderful finalists, visit here.

AI in Action: Compare the Market

EMEA | Financial Services

This accolade honors a brand that leverages AI capabilities within the Braze customer engagement platform to captivate and connect with their customers at scale.

Compare the Market’s car insurance renewals campaign had reached a ceiling, until it implemented Braze AI Decisioning Studioᵀᴹ and achieved a 17% conversion uplift after just two months.

Compare the Market’s car renewal campaign was already highly sophisticated thanks to Braze, using AI to calculate the optimal moment in the year to generate insurance quotes for each customer and initiate contact. But the campaign had reached a ceiling. To drive additional growth, the team needed to optimize further.

Braze AI Decisioning Studioᵀᴹ met that need. The team implemented an ambitious and successful program to coordinate real-time decisions across six dimensions simultaneously (journey frequency, day of week, send time, hero image/copy, email content/pricing, and CTA), learning from customer responses in real time.

To achieve this, the team built 195 modular content blocks to support the creation of millions of personalized email combinations, and used them alongside an AI language model to generate contextual subject lines. A ‘community of bandits’ architecture used multiple AI agents to coordinate decisions, within defined guardrails around frequency and cadence to avoid accidentally alienating customers.

The results smashed their previous ceiling, delivering +9% uplift over BAU in the first month, and 17% a month later. AI-generated subject lines added a further +28.7% open rate and +25.7% click rate uplift within that incremental 17%.

Amazingly, given the ambition of the project, Compare the Market implemented the program in just 57 days, making them worthy winners of our AI in Action award.

Campaign of the Year: Zé Delivery x Brahma

LATAM | Retail and consumer goods

This award recognizes a specific campaign that demonstrates strategic leadership and technical proficiency in the pursuit of stronger consumer/brand relationships.

Zé Delivery and Brahma scored sales and brand affinity by turning beer purchases into investments in fans’ nominated football clubs, netting a 30% increase in average spend.

Zé Delivery and Brahma wanted to deepen brand affinity in Brazil’s dedicated football communities. Building on the momentum of the World Cup, they teamed up to turn beer purchases into football club investments. At no cost to the customer, Brahma donated 10% of every order value to fans’ specified clubs (20% for non-alcoholic beer). A live league table showed total money raised per team (dominated by larger clubs), as well as average spend per fans (giving fans of smaller teams the chance to show their loyalty could rival the biggest clubs).

This innovative campaign—fronted by retired soccer player Ronaldo Nazário—tapped into the psychology of fandom and social identity, turning a routine purchase into an opportunity to support a team and compete against rivals. That emotional connection translated into R$30M+ in incremental revenue and a 30% uplift in average spend per Brahma order via Zé Delivery.

Collaborative Team of the Year: Wealthsimple

North America | Financial Services

This category recognizes teams who work across disciplines to collaboratively create best-in-class campaigns for their audiences using Braze.

Wealthsimple needed to move faster with its Monthly Millionaire program. Braze-enabled cross-functional collaboration improved speed and customer experience, processing billions of entries in its first month.

Wealthsimple’s Monthly Millionaire program turns mundane money matters into an opportunity to win life-changing financial prizes. As a high-profile, frequently changing part of the customer experience, it needed the polish of a product feature but the speed of a promotion. To deliver both, Wealthsimple had to find ways to break down silos between engineering, data, creative, growth, customer experience, and other teams.

Their solution was a novel architectural approach dubbed “the Braze burger.” All working within the centralized Braze platform, each team owned a different layer of the burger. Engineering built containers and deep links, growth owned creative and personalization using Liquid personalization, data synced custom attributes, etc.

Combined with the Braze platform’s intuitive no-coding functionality for marketers, and AI assistance, this enabled Wealthsimple to execute quickly, accurately, and compliantly. They doubled the pace of new checking account clients. And, two weeks post-launch, Growth and CX shipped multiple improvements without waiting for an app release, giving campaigns a product feel at promotion pace.

Creative Excellence: Wendy’s

North America | Restaurants and On-Demand

This award recognizes a team that harnessed the Braze customer engagement platform to deliver original, innovative customer messaging experiences.

Wendy’s partnered with Netflix to tap into the popularity of the TV show Wednesday and build loyalty through an irreverent, gamified QSR experience, generating 1M+ new loyalty accounts.

Wendy’s wanted to build brand affinity and loyalty within its core 18-35 demographic and knew it needed something that felt both culturally relevant and relevant to the Wendy’s brand. So when a fellow pig-tailed icon who shared the brand’s first initial got her own Netflix series, the creative die was cast.

To coincide with the Wednesday series launch, Wendy’s renamed items in her honor. Gothic POS populated stores, juice came in coffin-shaped cartons, and packaging for their new Meal of Misfortune proclaimed ‘There’s nothing happy about this meal’; a playful inversion of the usual family-friendly fast food formula.

The supporting digital experience saw push and SMS rewritten in Wednesday’s tone-of-voice, and app users receive a unique weekly tarot card offering bonus loyalty points and doubling rewards for Meals of Misfortune ordered via the app.

To raise this creative vision from the dead, Wendy’s used Braze to power the gamified experience and personalized messaging. Braze Canvas ensured users never received the same tarot card twice, and webhooks between Braze and the loyalty platform Punchh kept points accurate in real-time.

The campaign drove 1.1M new loyalty accounts, produced 7M tarot interactions, 311K incremental loyalty purchasers, and 964bps conversion lift.

As the only entry to score top marks on all four criteria for this award, our judges thought Wendy’s execution of this campaign was dead on.

Marketing Leader of the Year: Sarah Lands Ramrup, Nestlé Purina

North America | Retail and Consumer Goods

This award recognizes a marketing executive or executives who manage a team that builds innovative, personalized, customer-centric campaigns in Braze.

Sarah Lands Ramrup embodies the customer-centricity at the heart of Braze. She puts customers, not marketing schedules, at the heart of digital experiences and uses Braze to bring her vision to life.

Sarah Lands Ramrup led Purina’s adoption of Braze in 2023 and, in 2024, ran a decisive proof-of-concept pilot that compared Salesforce’s schedule-based messaging against Braze’s behaviorally triggered messaging. This saw passive-to-engaged users spending 225% more, securing buy-in for a global rollout.

Sarah’s program committed to increasing their conversion rate from 13% to 15% in 2026, but ended up significantly overperforming, driving a 24% conversion rate in Q1. Under her leadership, the team has doubled activations and delivered a 28% uplift using Braze AI Decisioning Studioᵀᴹ cross-sell activities.

AI is fundamental to Sarah’s vision. Her team has evolved from inherited manual processes to one where AI drives offer selection. Weekly Braze AI working sessions are a standing team fixture, and agentic AI workflows are fully operational.

With Braze’s own product team asking Purina what’s driving such strong engagement, Sarah was the natural choice for this award.

Rising Marketing Star: Zahra Khan, Pizza Hut

North America | Restaurants and On-Demand

This award recognizes an exceptional new user of the Braze platform whose work leverages technology in thoughtful, effective ways to support better user relationships and stronger business outcomes.

In just two years with the brand, Zahra Khan has become Pizza Hut’s go-to marketer for Braze, CRM, and loyalty innovation, driving impressive commercial gains.

Zahra Khan was nominated for her deep technical knowledge and sharp understanding of business. At Pizza Hut, she owns business-critical Braze programs, from the Hut Rewards catalogue to BrazeAI Decisioning Studioᵀᴹ, lifecycle journeys, and loyalty mechanics.

She personally built the strategy, financial model and backend for the new rewards catalog, increasing franchisee profitability by 12% on day one by right-sizing redemption costs. She also led Welcome to the Jam, Pizza Hut’s March Madness x Space Jam loyalty experience, orchestrating 60 in-app messages (IAMs), 43 emails, 77 push/SMS messages, all with zero incremental headcount.

Her work is delivering measurable growth. Welcome to the Jam generated 447,000 new Hut Rewards sign-ups (49% above goal) and generated $36.4M in incremental revenue.

Nominated for Pizza Hut’s Presidents Council and publicly recognized for her work by their US President of Growth Marketing, it is only fair that Zahra is hailed by Braze as our Rising Star 2026.

Bonfire Community Leader: Nirnay Polaboina, Luxury Escapes

APAC | Travel and Hospitality

This award recognizes a veteran Braze Bonfire community member who is both an active participant and stands out for helping fellow Braze users.

Nirnay Polaboina has earned Expert status on the Braze platform’s online Bonfire Community, sharing his in-depth platform expertise generously with others. But, like Braze webhooks, it goes both ways…

In five years, Nirnay Polaboina has progressed from a Junior Marketing Automation Specialist at Luxury Escapes to their Engineering Manager for Customer Lifecycle. He’s learnt a lot about Braze on this career journey and delights in sharing his knowledge with others via the Braze Bonfire Community online.

Nirnay initially joined the community to ask questions, not answer them. But as his knowledge grew, he enjoyed paying forward what he’d learned. “That one reply turned into a habit, and somewhere along the way it became a genuine passion,” he says.

Nirnay doesn’t just suggest what might work. He reproduces user problems and diligently finds solutions that do work, then stays in the thread until the problem is resolved. And helping others has taught him a lot too. “It works both ways: I help someone get unblocked, and I learn a ton myself, because I test and verify solutions. It is a real win-win.”

This year, Nirnay graduated from giving online support to sharing his expertise IRL, presenting on how Luxury Escapes uses BrazeAI Agent Consoleᵀᴹ. Having earned Expert status in the community, Nirnay has more than earned his award as Bonfire Community Leader 2026.

Braze for Social Impact: Ridery

LATAM | Travel and Transportation

This category recognizes a team using Braze technology to devise a solution for a social impact challenge, making a positive impact on the world at large. The winner of this award will direct a $10,000 grant to the charity of their recommendation, funded by our Braze for Social Impact Fund.

Ridery built a real-time earthquake alert system in under 24 hours after a major quake struck Venezuela, creating permanent public safety infrastructure that spreads information, not panic.

Ride-hailing app Ridery is on a mission to mobilize Venezuelans in times of need. On June 24, 2026, a major earthquake struck the country. In the hours that followed, Ridery drivers were transporting injured citizens to hospitals and keeping the city moving when everything else had stopped.

As part of its emergency response—including guaranteed earnings to every driver who stayed on the road, and free rides to hospitals via a promo code—it deployed a real-time seismic alert system to keep users informed with safety information.

Sending a seismic alert to all 400,000 users in Venezuela for an isolated earthquake wastes notification trust and trains users to ignore future alerts. So their alert system uses the custom attribute 'city' in Braze profiles. When a quake is reported, Braze pinpoints the location, calculates the impact radius, maps affected cities, and builds a Connected Audience dynamically with OR conditions. Liquid personalization uses emojis to represent the magnitude of the quake.

Despite being built by a non-developer in under 24 hours, the system is now permanent infrastructure, helping Venezuelans know when it’s safe to travel.

Partner Campaign of the Year: Stitch x RaceTrac

This category recognizes partners who delight their customers through a unique campaign and strategy built with Braze capabilities.

RaceTrac partnered with Stitch to spin up a gamified loyalty experience in order to capitlize on a co-branding opportunity with Coca-Cola.

Leading convenience store chain RaceTrac had millions of app users but had never built a gamified loyalty experience. When an opportunity emerged to partner with Coca-Cola, Stitch helped RaceTrac build out a branded in-app board game where each qualifying purchase unlocked gameplay and instant rewards, giving the company a chance to co-market with Coca-Cola and lift drink purchase frequency.

Stitch worked as an extension of the RaceTrac team, validating what was possible in Braze, recommending the mechanics, and then leading strategy, generating via Figma creative, overseeing development and QA, and supporting a successful launch in just 11 weeks. The build was technically ambitious: Purchase events fired straight from POS data to advance each player's position, six Braze Canvases running in parallel, and a custom local-storage architecture solved data latency across the Braze platform's then-new Banner feature.

Delivery Partner of the Year: WPP Enterprise Solutions

This award celebrates a service partner who significantly advanced their Braze practice through comprehensive training and innovation to markedly improve business outcomes.

No delivery partner grew its Braze practice faster this year than WPP Enterprise Solutions, which earned 600 certifications across AMER, LATAM, ANZ, APAC, and EMEA. That represents a 56% jump year over year, and the organization took that expertise straight into the product, serving as a BrazeAI Agent Consoleᵀᴹ launch partner and leading multiple Agent Console hackathons where they’ve supported customers in understanding and adopting the product.

That practice shows up in the work. For ESPN, the team migrated the email channel to Braze and built a native monitoring solution from out-of-the-box features, allowing ESPN to reach 15 million customers across 18 lifecycle campaigns and laying a foundation for future innovation. For Hugo Boss, they centralized campaign capabilities and connected customer profiles through Braze and Tealium, mapping customer journeys for a more consistent member experience, and saw a 25% decrease in average cost per campaign and a 35% increase in sales per campaign.. And for Zé Delivery, its World Cup Bolão Bud activation drove a 149% uplift in Bud purchases over WhatsApp.

Technology Partner of the Year: Databricks

This category recognizes a Braze Alloys technology partner who enables brands to deliver exceptional experiences to their users.

Databricks has helped Braze customers connect their customer data and experiences in a fundamentally simpler way—increasing security, reducing silos, and eliminating the “middleware tax.”

In under six months, Databricks elevated a tactical integration into a flagship strategic partnership with Braze, aiming to revolutionize the customer data landscape.

By pairing Databricks’ customer data lakehouse with the Braze platform’s activation layer, engagement data can flow between systems without copying or moving the underlying data. That means less duplication, fewer data silos, and a reduced attack surface.

Rapid, cross-company execution saw the Databrick x Braze team co-design, validate, and launch the integration—DeltaShare, now called OpenSharing —ready for launch by June’s Data + AI Summit. Here, Databricks certified Braze as an official Databricks Data Partner and launch partner for the Customer Lake product.

Supported by strong roadmap alignment, the partnership is delivering robust commercial momentum. Their shared customer base expanded significantly, with over 200 mutual brands able to leverage this powerful partnership and joint solution.

Transformation Partner of the Year: CACI x Legal & General

This category recognizes a Braze partner who demonstrated excellence to drive a transformative change for one of their customers.

Leading UK financial services brand Legal & General had achieved near-universal Workplace Pension participation but still saw persistently low member engagement. In part, that was because their communications were built for compliance rather than behavior, their data and decisioning ran in isolation, and the company used a batch-and-campaign model that left critical moments unaddressed. In addition, their legacy tech stack simply could not support AI, predictive modeling, or real-time personalization, limiting their ability to keep up with new advances in customer engagement.

To help Legal & General evolve their approach, CACI led a full reinvention rather than a migration—bringing on Snowflake as the analytical data hub, Tealium as the real-time CDP, Braze as the activation and orchestration layer, and Optimizely CMS for personalized content. Static campaigns gave way to event-triggered, behavior-led journeys with next-best-action decisioning, and content variants grew from one or two to more than 50, and up to 80 dynamic combinations assembled by profile, context, and intent.

A 35-plus-person specialist team redesigned processes, governance, and the operating model alongside the technology. The impact was visible across the board: A 217% rise in registrations and logins, a 220% lift in meaningful customer actions, a 50% increase in transfer completion rates, and hundreds of millions in annual transfer impact. Audience creation dropped from four weeks to under an hour, and more than 70,000 customers reached retirement planning tools, with one in three completing a full plan.

Market Maker APAC: Composed Digital

This award celebrates a partner that has driven meaningful in-market impact and high customer satisfaction across its region. This category honors the partners who lead where they operate, expanding what customers can achieve and setting the pace for the market around them.

Composed Digital is the first and only-pure play delivery partner built entirely around Braze in Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ). Founded in 2025 and already growing fast, the team has become the go-to for some of the region's most demanding Braze work.

Demonstrating unmatched technical capability, Composed Digital successfully onboarded Great Southern Bank as the region’s first APRA-regulated financial institution on Braze. They built three proprietary Braze Amplifiers (ready-to-use partner solutions that integrate with Braze for specific business challenges) to expand their ecosystem integration.

Their work with Webjet Australia represents an exceptional example of a CRM transformation executed in lockstep with a complete brand, website, and app relaunch. This delivered a 95% drop in campaign production time, slashing turnaround from three days per week to just 30 minutes, an improvement that they implemented alongside a massive expansion from zero to six channels.

Market Maker EMEA: Massive Rocket

This award celebrates a partner that has driven meaningful in-market impact and high customer satisfaction across its region. This category honors the partners who lead where they operate, expanding what customers can achieve and setting the pace for the market around them.

Massive Rocket has delivered exceptional impact through two standout, high-complexity deployments across Europe.

When Massive Rocket began working with KFC España y Portugal, the brand didn’t have a loyalty program. But by leveraging Massive Rocket in tandem with Braze, they were able to make that dream a reality, earning 600,000 loyalty members in just 44 days. To achieve this, Massive Rocket executed a zero-to-one loyalty program using 14 Canvases, a real-time Talon.One integration, Intelligent Timing, and a controlled migration ramp featuring automated safety nets.

Thanks to Braze, customers’ points, tier, and rewards update in real time whether they're ordering in the app, at the kiosk, or in the drive-thru. Early indications are highly encouraging, with 40% of all loyalty scheme members going on to make a purchase.

Congratulations to all of our 2026 nominees and winners, and thank you to everyone who attended this year’s Forge.