An Oral History of the World’s First Viral Credit Card

Word began leaking out about the mythical Chase Sapphire Reserve in the summer of 2016.

Sebastian Fung [founder of Ask Sebby, a credit card and travel site]: I think I heard about it from a lot of other blogs, and my first reaction was: It’s crazy. For a lot of other cards the annual fee was harder to justify, but here you would be coming out way ahead. [Chase was] coming out guns blazing.

Vu Nguyen [operator of the DevLon NorthWest product-review YouTube channel; Nguyen talked to Wirecutter from a Mexico trip paid for with Chase Ultimate Rewards points]: When I first heard about the card through word of mouth online, I never believed a credit card company would give a 100,000-point bonus. That made me very excited.

Fung: I think it was just one of [those] things [that] seem so obviously good that you want to tell your friends about it. It’s like finding out a Lamborghini costs $50,000, which is a lot—but wait, Lamborghinis are usually $300,000.

Brian Kelly [founder of The Points Guy, a credit card and travel site; Kelly talked to Wirecutter after using 70,000 Alaska Airlines miles and $500 to fly British Airways first class to London]: We were the launch partner. When I found out about the offer, I was in Tanzania on a safari. I literally had to sit down when I heard what the offer was.

William Charles [founder of Doctor Of Credit, a credit card and deals site]: I can’t remember where I was when I first heard about it, but our site was the one to break details of the card coming and specifics of the card itself.

Kelly: That July, rumors started to come out.

Nguyen: I don’t recall a card going viral with very limited marketing.

Kelly: First and foremost, the offer was very clearly extremely strong. But I think their approach to it was brilliant. Most cards would have money go into television ads, billboards, and shiny endorsements. [Chase] came to the digital space. They actually announced the card on Twitter in August 2016. They didn’t want to release anything until launch, but there were so many leaks, they put out a tweet.

Kelly: That day was wild. When that link went out, it was the wildest day of my career for sure. User applications just kept going and going—it was an amazing offer and everyone knew it.

Charles: I thought the card and sign-up bonus was extremely generous and wouldn’t last.

The hype didn’t stop when the Chase Sapphire Reserve came out. Many people posted videos on YouTube to document their unboxing of the heralded Reserve. For his part, Jackson managed to receive his card on the day it officially launched, thanks to a mistaken link that lived on Reddit for a few hours.

Mark Jackson [credit card writer at Brad’s Deals]: I hadn’t watched [the unboxing video] in a while. I realized I was able to apply for the Reserve through a Reddit link that wasn’t supposed to be live. The developer site went live and someone from Reddit found the link and posted it. This is how I was able to get it, because I’m well above the 5/24 rule. [This is a Chase rule that says you cannot qualify for a card if you’ve obtained five or more cards within the past two years.]

I figured I’ve never done an unboxing video in my life, and it would be hilarious if it got any views.

Kelly: Because people had been waiting around for it to come, it was a precious gift.

Jackson: I saw the box when I got home, and whipped out the camera, and just took a really crappy video. There was no thought put behind it, and it was my most viewed video. It was funny because I went to film school and I actually know how to shoot video. It being this launch was massive, and people were interested in being part of the conversation. It’s hilarious. It’s just a credit card.

Kelly: Our unboxing videos did okay. The actual posts on the reviews and what counts as travel, our content, was way more popular. Who knows why people put up videos? Why are there videos of people eating pickles and opening toys?

Applications for the Reserve spiked, and major news outlets picked up on the fevered reaction.

Charles: It was easy for everyday consumers to understand how good the card was without needing to do a deep dive on how loyalty programs operate.

Kelly: Once influencers got the card—and by influencers, I mean the points person in a group of friends—it became a thing.

Fung: I think the 100,000-point intro bonus with an effective annual fee [of] only $150 [$450 annual fee minus $300 in automatic travel credits] made it seem very reasonable to at least try it out for a year.

Kelly: The 100,000 bonus was wild. Chase had done a 100,000-miles bonus on a British Airways card in April 2011—that’s what started my blogging career.

Fung: One of the benefits of Chase cards is that if you don’t like something you can always downgrade it to the Chase Freedom or Freedom Unlimited [both of which are no-annual-fee cash-back cards].

Jackson: I think the biggest strength of the launch was that it was a strong offering. It was something you could actually promote if you were an influencer. I don’t know how much James Corden knew about credit. [Chase hired James Corden for a series of digital ads showing his vicarious visits to Chile, Uganda, and Japan.]

Kelly: And they had Chrissy Teigen.

Nguyen: I believe most people, most average credit cards users, were attracted to the 100,000-point bonus and they were going to deal with the $450 next year. If they came out with a 60,000-point bonus, I don't think it would have created the viral effect it did.

Kelly: The kicker was the 3x points on travel and dining purchases. That’s the thing that made me think “wow.” At the time, there were 2x-point offers, and 3x on very minimal purchases, but this was 3x points on pretty much all airlines, hotels, subways, mass transit, tolls. You’re not just getting the bonus and moving on. You’re getting the bonus and keeping this card top of wallet.

Pam Codispoti [president of Chase-branded cards when the Reserve was released, as told to the Harvard Business School]: For millennials, “travel” might mean a once-in-a-lifetime trip around the world or it could mean taking a Lyft to a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Chinatown and then riding the subway to karaoke, and then catching a taxi home. So we decided to give customers accelerated rewards on all those purchases.

Fung: I think Priority Pass was a nice cherry on top. I was someone who didn’t have premium cards before, and when I thought of lounges I thought of them being stuffy and exclusive. When I actually went in with the Reserve, I was like, “Oh, it’s just normal people. It’s not like there’s caviar in there—it’s more cheese and crackers.” Knowing you could have drinks for free effectively, that’s a nice perk compared to drinking at other bars in the airport where you're looking at $10 to $15 a drink.

Jackson: The popularity of the card definitely took them by surprise because they ran out of metal cards at the beginning.

Fung: I got the metal one.

Nguyen: When you have the metal card, that feeling in your wallet, it takes a while to forget about.

Fung: I wasn’t going to get a metal card for the sake of getting a metal card, but I do think for a lot of people the fact that metal substance being more rare at that point, it ended up being a decision factor.

Jackson: It wasn’t my first metal card. I’ve been writing about credit cards for nine years. That aspect of it is a little funny. The American Express Platinum used to be one of the only luxury cards out there people would talk about, and they had to launch their own metal card in response. It came in a box; when I first got it [years before] it came in an envelope.

Fung: You saw a lot of other cards that were not metal and are now metal. The Amazon card is metal.

Kelly: People love a beautiful card. It’s part of the allure.

CompoSecure, the company that manufactured the Reserve, wouldn’t agree to an interview. The International Card Manufacturers Association named the company as a “first finalist” in the 2017 Èlan Awards for Card Manufacturing Excellence for the Reserve.

David Tushie [chief executive of Magellan Consulting, a card consulting firm, and one of the three Èlan Awards judges]: I voted for it to be number one. [The Reserve ultimately lost to a card issued by Bank of Communications, a Korean bank.] The Reserve was memorable to me. The design had an understated elegance, in that it tried to mimic the name of the card. It had dark blue with a lighter blue faded into it in its image, and you had the definite impression that a Sapphire refracted or reflected image through something like a sapphire stone. The other thing that struck me was how they matched the coloring of the Chase Sapphire name with the metal image of the card itself—it was a silver metal luster to the printed information on the card, including the Visa logo. It gave you this impression of a lustrous metal material.

In the years after the Reserve’s release, American Express and Citi improved their respective premium cards. But only the Amex Gold, with a $250 annual fee and high earnings for dining, groceries, and travel, could really compete with the Reserve; it didn’t hurt that the Gold (initially) came in a special rose-gold edition. Chase also took steps to deter churners.

Nguyen: Last year Chase made minor tweaks to the card. I felt they were petty. You have to spend $300 on travel before accumulating bonus points. I’m 100% still pleased with the card itself.

Charles: I think Chase also overestimated how much they would be able to make from cross-selling this card segment other more lucrative products, like investment and home loans.

Jamie Dimon [JPMorgan Chase chief executive officer, in Davos in January 2017]: One of the fictions here is that the marketing cost ... gets booked over 12 months. The benefit of the card gets booked over seven years. The card was so successful, it cost us $200 million, but we expect that to have a good return on it. I wish it was a $400 million loss.

In July 2018, JPMorgan Chase announced that the rewards from the Sapphire and other credit cards cost the bank more than $330 million.

Kelly: Premium cards are still a hot market. Marriott has its $450-annual-fee card. Airlines do as well. The market is strong and I wouldn’t be surprised if other banks get into the game.

Nguyen: I don’t believe that it has lost a lot of its aura. I don’t believe the Citi Prestige and American Express Platinum offer what the Reserve offers.

Kelly: The Prestige and Platinum since upped their bonus categories to one-up each other. With the Platinum, American Express has said, “We’re not going to compete with you on points, we’re going to beat you with perks.” The Centurion Lounge and Delta lounge access blows away what any other card offers. The Reserve just has Priority Pass. Amex is saying, “We’re going to give you an experience that no other card can give.”

Fung [who decided to downgrade his Reserve card]: In the fall of 2018, American Express ended up changing the Gold to make it very competitive for dining, which was the category that really made me keep the Reserve all this time. When I looked back in my calculations, I hit a point where I probably could justify keeping the Reserve—I was breaking even on it—but I didn’t need to keep it.

Jackson: My wife got the rose Gold [a limited-time American Express offer]. I told her, “All your friends are going to ask you about it when you pull it out.” And they did, just because of the color. They didn’t know about the spending bonus or anything.

Fung: I think the Gold card did a very good job, what American Express did, launch the card with a good spending bonus, lower effective annual fee if you count all the credits you get, the limited-edition rose-gold design. I think that was the closest we’ve seen to the Reserve.

Jackson: I don’t have the Reserve anymore. With the Gold, the dining rewards were better, and I like staying at Hyatts, so my hotel spending goes on my Hyatt card. It just didn’t make sense to keep the Reserve for me.

Fung: My decision was a little controversial … people who have a specific card don’t want to feel their choice was wrong. There are definitely people who are attached to the Reserve. For a lot of them it was their only premium card, especially someone coming out of college. When you apply for Chase and [are] approved for a $10,000 credit limit, you feel like an “MVP” when you’re just a “P.”

Jackson: In college, I was the only person with a card. Everyone else thought I was nuts chasing these sign-up offers and launching to put the entire meal bill on my card and have everyone pay me in cash. Six months ago I was at a group dinner, and everyone pulled out a metal card (a lot of them were the Reserve). Pretty much everyone had a credit card they wanted to put points on.

There’s no way there’s going to be a card launch that takes up that amount of the conversation again.