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Coverage of top innovators and technology trends from across The FutureList community

How Goody is Transforming the Gift-Giving Experience in the US Through Innovation and Personalisation

The gifting industry in the United States is massive, valued at over $1.4 trillion (2021). Of this, corporate gifting accounts for over $240 billion, while $1.18 trillion comes from personal gift-giving. Americans spend billions each year on gifts for holidays, weddings, birthdays, and other occasions. For every $10 spent by Americans, $1 is spent buying someone a gift. Key gift categories include gift cards, food, and personalized gifts.

To learn more about their innovations in this space, The FutureList interviewed Nicholas Teddy, VP of Growth at Goody, a leading online gift-sending platform in the US. Whether sending gifts to employees, clients, sales prospects, or friends and family, users can easily select and send curated gifts without the need for a mailing address. Recipients can customize their gift preferences and provide their shipping information when accepting the gift. Goody’s gift collection includes 350+ highly curated brands, including Ember mugs, Milk Bar, Therabody, Levain Bakery, Apple Airpods, and Lula’s Garden. 

The FutureList: How does Goody differentiate itself from other gift-sending platforms? Are there unique features or technologies that set Goody apart and contribute to its growth?

Nicholas Teddy: Absolutely. The biggest feature of all is the quality of our gift collection. We have a lot of business customers. Yet unlike most business gifting platforms out there, our gifts are the kind of trendy, high-quality products that you’d send to a personal friend.

Another feature that makes Goody unique is our acceptance flow, which lets you send a gift with only an email or phone number (the recipient provides their own shipping details.) 

We also let recipients swap gifts for equal or lower-priced options. That means that you, as a sender, never have to stress about your recipient not liking what you choose for them.

The FutureList: Can you discuss the user experience within the Goody app and how it enhances the gifting process? How important is personalization and customization for both senders and recipients?

Nicholas Teddy: We’re often praised for the elegance and simplicity of our app, especially for people using our Business platform to send gifts.

On Goody for Business, we make it easy to include personalized messages. When you’re sending a batch of Goody gifts, you can dynamically insert the person’s first name into your digital card message. In addition, you can upload a custom card with your own company branding.

You can even curate a custom collection (say, 10 or so different gifts or swag items), and let your recipient choose from that specific gift “menu.” You can add a banner with your logo and branding, making it a very customized, bespoke way to send a gift.

The FutureList: How does Goody approach customer acquisition and retention in a competitive market? Can you highlight specific marketing or growth initiatives that have yielded exceptional results?

Nicholas Teddy: For us, we always want to max out on organic customer acquisition and product-led growth. So we put a lot of effort into turning our gift recipients into gift senders.

For example, when you receive a gift on Goody, we make it easy to create an account and get a $15 credit to try it yourself. We consistently find that the “word of mouth” channel is our largest and most significant source for customer acquisition.

Once we acquire and activate you as a customer, our retention rates are excellent. We see senders coming back again and again, and typically the longer they stay with us, the more they spend each time. 

The FutureList: Are there plans for geographic expansion beyond North America? Are there any specific new markets or demographics Goody is targeting in the near future?

Nicholas Teddy: Right now, we’re focused on supporting US-based companies. That said, we do help US companies gift internationally. Many companies use us because we can deliver gifts and gift cards to 140+ countries.

One market we’re particularly bullish about is sales prospecting. People in business development or sales development roles send a lot of gifts in order to book meetings with their target accounts. Teams that use Goody gifts as part of their sales development efforts have 10Xed the volume of meetings they’re able to book. 

The reason gifting works so well is that Goody gifts break through the noise. Gifts warm up prospects who get a lot of sales emails every day and tune out everything else.

The FutureList: How do you see the gifting marketplace’s market size evolving in terms of innovation and how is Goody positioned to lead or adapt to these changes?

Nicholas Teddy: In spite of the huge amounts being spent on gifts every year, economists often bemoan that gifting is incredibly inefficient and wasteful. 

The reason? It’s simple. People are terrible at knowing what other people want. This “value destruction” means that $100 spent on gifts is worth the same as about $85 spent directly by the recipient, according to one economist from the University of Minnesota. 

That’s one of the reasons that Goody has been so successful. We let recipients swap gifts for alternatives if they prefer – and about 50% of the time, they do! We also only charge the sender for gifts that the recipient accepts. 

These features eliminate virtually all of the wastefulness (economic and environmental) of conventional gifting.

The FutureList: Could you share how strategic partnerships and collaborations have contributed to Goody’s success?

Nicholas Teddy: One recent successful partnership was our integration with Postable. Postable is a platform that lets you send gorgeous direct-mail cards. For a long time, they’ve been looking for a way to add gifting upsells into their product. But they didn’t want to deal with inventory, warehousing, and so on.

They used Goody’s API to integrate gifts into their product so that they could sell gifts as users checked out on their site. It’s been a total success. Postable users love to add on gifts, Postable loves the way that AOVs have increased, and for Goody, it has been a new source of distribution and a great use case for our API.

The FutureList: What does the future hold for Goody? Any upcoming developments, or features that you can share with us?

Nicholas Teddy: We recently rolled out an API that lets you integrate Goody gifts directly into your website or app. You can earn revenue from sales that occur, without worrying about fulfilling orders or dealing with logistics or inventory (We handle all that.) 

This has been a really exciting development because it’s opened up an entirely new line of business for us: strategic partnerships. We’ve already brought on a number of API partners that are seeing great results through this offering, with many more to come.

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