Movies like Love Actually and Serendipity make Christmas shopping seem so much fun. When I watched them as a teenager, I imagined my future holidays would be spent visiting stores to pick up gloves for my mother-in-law and a scented candle for a friend, then taking a hot chocolate break with cheery music in the background.
As an adult, gift buying hasn’t been the joy I thought it would be. Sure, I enjoy picking gifts for my husband and kids, but it feels like work to shop for extended family, babysitters, and close friends—then wrap everything up. But it turns out, there’s now a solution for this: the online gift concierge.
Outsourcing gift buying is not a new concept. Privileged people could always turn to specialists at luxury department stores or get their secretaries to do the job. But over the past eight years, there’s been a wave of online startups that will do the work for you. While some of these services, like Poppy Gifting focus more on white glove service, all of the brands including Knack, Box Fox, and Simone LeBlanc offer pre-packaged customized gifts that start at under $30.
These companies saw a big spike during the pandemic and are continuing to see explosive growth as we head into the holiday season, which accounts for more than half of the revenue generated in this sector. And given the size of the personal gifting industry, which Coresight Research estimates is $1.18 trillion in the U.S. alone, the business opportunity is enormous.
The emotional labor of gifting falls on women
Every culture in the world uses gift giving as a way to strengthen social bonds. Here in the U.S., the ritual is concentrated over the winter holidays, since the majority of Americans celebrate Christmas and Hannukah. There is extensive social science research showing that the work of gift buying falls overwhelmingly on women: Wives are tasked with picking presents for the whole family; in offices, women are responsible for buying them for employees or clients.
It’s no surprise that nearly every gifting startup was founded by female entrepreneurs. Box Fox, Knack, and Poppy Gifting all launched in the mid to late 2010s. In each case, the founders’ goal was to use e-commerce to make gift selection more efficient. Customers provide information about the person and occasion they are shopping for (think: baby showers, housewarmings, birthdays, and promotions). Once they select the gift, it is attractively wrapped, often with a handwritten note, then sent directly to the recipient.
When Chelsea Moore launched Box Fox in 2014, right out of college, she says the gendered nature of gifting was immediately obvious. Male friends were skeptical that the business would work, while women immediately understood the concept. Today, the majority of Box Fox customers are female, and they’re often buying on behalf of their family or friend group. The company now sells tens of thousands of gift boxes every year, and is profitable. “Relationship management is left to women,” she says. “They do more emotional labor to keep social connections alive. And it is labor: It takes time, effort, and work to buy gifts.”
At the same time, men sometimes need more guidance when it comes to gift buying, says Willa Callahan, cofounder of Poppy Gifting, a higher-end service that launched in 2019 and charges customers a flat fee to curate and send presents. When men are in a situation where they are forced to shop for a gift, like Valentine’s Day or Christmas, concierges are particularly useful to them. “Women are are largest customers throughout the year,” she says. “But men come to us when they are intimidated by the question of whether their wife would like a scarf or a bag better, and what brand they should pick.”
The pandemic transformed gifting
COVID-19 hypercharged the gift concierge industry. When Americans went into lockdown, isolated from friends and family, sending gifts became an important way to create connection, says Laura Jennings, who founded Knack in 2015, and now generates more than $20 million a year. “Nobody could take their mother to brunch on Mother’s Day or meet up with a friend on their birthday,” she says. “We were all trying to figure out how to maintain relationships when we don’t see each other.”
Consumer awareness about these gifting services grew in 2020 and 2021, and business has continued to accelerate since then. Jennings bootstrapped Knack from the start, but late last year, business was growing so quickly that she decided to take $3.5 million in Series A funding.
Across all of these personal gifting platforms, growth during the pandemic came partly from companies that wanted to give gifts to employees and clients when work went remote. There are specialized corporate gifting platforms that deliver gifts at scale, like Clove & Twine that can create products emblazoned with a logo and Loop & Tie, which enables employees to pick the gift they want from a range of products, sourced from small businesses. Meanwhile, Knack and Box Fox specialize in more personal gifts in a professional setting, such as a boss buying a gift for her assistant.
Making an Outsourced Gift Feel Personal
In all of these scenarios, outsourcing gift-buying can be a tricky business. There is a social expectation that gifting should be an intimate experience, where the giver carefully picks just the right thing. That’s why it’s considered bad form for a husband to enlist his secretary to buy an anniversary present for his wife.
Gifting concierges must make the recipient feel like their gift was picked with care, while also making the process easy and efficient for the giver. Jennings argues that the secret of gift giving is realizing that the gift itself is not actually the point. “We gift to feel connected to the other person,” she says. “There’s an object involved, but the context and experience around the object is what really makes it a gift.”
Each of these companies has found unique ways to make gifts feel personal. Knack, for instance, creates a micro-website for each gift, so the recipient can scan a QR code to see a little video from the giver explaining why they selected the gift. Box Fox’s staff hand writes the notes on each present.
Meanwhile, Poppy offers a more high-touch experience. For $150, customers can fill out form about the person they are shopping for. They can provide as much detail as they want, including an inside joke or a special memory. Then the company will provide a curated catalog of presents. “You have to understand the psychology of the relationship between the giver and the recipient,” says Callahan. “The more specific detail you can offer, the better.”
But all of these companies also believe that good branding can help a gift feel special. They’ve worked on creating a luxurious, memorable unboxing experience for the recipient, and making it clear that the giver played a pivotal role in selecting the gift. “We want to normalize gifting services,” says Callahan. “A concierge can help eliminate a laborious and time-consuming task, but the gift inside can be no less thoughtful.”
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