The Giftly Blog

We're being acquired by GiftCards.com!

Thu, 23 May 2013 18:55:11 -0700

The press release:

GiftCards.com, the highest ranking and most trafficked gift card website on the Internet, agrees to acquire Giftly, a two-year old startup that enables consumers to buy and deliver digital gifts via its website and free app.

Pittsburgh, PA. May 22, 2013 – GiftCards.com™, the leading website for gift cards, today agreed to acquire Giftly, the leading mobile gifting app, to build a digital and mobile commerce platform in the $110 billion gift card industry.

Founded in 1999, GiftCards.com commands strong positions in both the plastic and digital gift card spaces. With long-standing bank relationships and as a certified issuer of all three major payment networks, the company prints on-demand custom gift-cards in its own facility. As the number one gift cards website in traffic and leading organic searches on all things gift cards, it offers the widest range of products: personalized, pre-designed, virtual, local, group, and discount gift cards. It has 3 industry-related patents issued and another 38 pending for game-changing business concepts.

Giftly, a two-year old startup based in San Francisco, enables consumers to buy and deliver digital gifts via its website and free app. Giftly has pioneered a new platform for gift cards which sends gift credits to recipients when they redeem a gift, rather than issuing plastic cards, and requires no point of sale integration.

“Digital and mobile gifting is the future of the industry and we have invested heavily in patenting technologies in this space” stated, Jason Wolfe, CEO of GiftCards.com. “The Giftly acquisition is a logical and exciting step into building the industry’s future with an established partner in the fast-growing m-commerce space.” CEB estimates that 85% of US consumers exchanged gift cards in 2012 and projects electronic gifting will grow to $15 billion by 2015.

Giftly will be rolled into the GiftCards.com operation but will maintain its offices in San Francisco. “This is an exciting opportunity for Giftly,” commented CEO Timothy Bentley, “by partnering with GiftCards.com, we can combine the strengths of a traditional gift card player with the innovative platform that Giftly has developed.”

GiftCards.com is talking to a number of venture firms and strategic investors to raise its first round of funding to accelerate the combined companies’ growth.

Buy now, deliver later!

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 15:04:00 -0800

Now you have the option to deliver your Giftly at a later date.

When you buy a Giftly through the app or the web site, you can set a delivery date in the future and we’ll deliver the Giftly that morning.

Deliver Later to:

• Ensure you don’t forget to send a gift on the right day.

• Get your holiday gifting done early.

• Make sure their Giftly is received at the perfect moment.

Happy gifting!

Introducing the Printable Giftly

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 15:50:00 -0800

We just added the option to print out a Giftly from the Giftly website, so that you can deliver a Giftly to a recipient personally.

Print out a Giftly to:

• Hand to the host of a holiday party

• Stuff in a stocking or tuck into a card

• See the look of joy on the recipient’s face

To compliment the Giftly, we also designed a matching envelope that you can use.

After you choose the printable option on the Delivery Options page and checkout, you’ll receive a email with the Giftly and envelope attached. A few minutes with a scissors later and you’ll be all set to deliver that Giftly in real life!

Giftlys IRL: what will we think of next!

Redesigned Giftly website

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 13:30:32 -0800

The Giftly Team is pleased to announce the launch of our redesigned website, which uses the new look and feel that we developed for mobile.

Giftly is a product that must bridge the desktop and mobile platforms for the simple reason that many, many gifts are purchased and received online but the vast majority are used on the mobile device.

We’ll be fleshing out the site over the next few months as we continue to build useful tools to help make giving great gifts even easier, but this is a first step.

Why people don't give plastic gift cards

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 16:37:53 -0800

According to this article, “Two-thirds of affluent American women want gift cards. But less than a fifth of men will give it to them.”

That doesn’t surprise us at Giftly because plastic gift cards aren’t personal and don’t feel good to give, so why would you give that to a woman you care about…even if that’s what she wants.

When we started Giftly, we started it with a simple premise: make a gift card that people could love. We wanted to make a gift card that felt personal and contained the type of character you want in a gift. So we re-invented the gift card, from beginning to end.

People like receiving gift cards because then they can pick out something they want and they can avoid getting something they don’t want. We’ve made a gift card that does all that and also feels nice to give because it can be fully customized and made specifically for the person you’re giving the gift to.

You can make a Giftly for the person’s favorite restaurant, or a boutique you know they love, or for something that you know they love to do. You can give them the gift of travel, or a babysitter, or a bottle of wine. Great gifts that they will love and that you can feel good about giving.

Now you can Re-Send a Giftly

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 16:58:27 -0700

When any of us give a gift, we all want to know that that gift is received and enjoyed. This is especially true for electronic gifts and especially true for gift cards.

Earlier this week, Giftly released an update for our iPhone app. In this release is a feature that allows you to re-send a Giftly if it hasn’t been opened after a few days.

One of the benefits of sending a Giftly is that you can see whether your gift has been opened and used, giving the gift giver the ability to keep track of their gifts after they’re sent.

With this new app release, if you see the recipient still hasn’t opened your gift, you can send it again via the same or a new delivery mechanism. So, if you gave a friend a Giftly via a Facebook Wall Post, but they haven’t opened it, maybe because they don’t check Facebook all that often, you can send them the Giftly to them again via email.

We’ve been using this feature internally and we love it. We want all gifts given on Giftly to be used an enjoyed and we think this feature will help ensure that happens.

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Tue, 16 Oct 2012 12:48:58 -0700

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Thu, 11 Oct 2012 15:26:36 -0700

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Wed, 10 Oct 2012 14:17:36 -0700

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Tue, 09 Oct 2012 17:15:05 -0700

Gift Watch and Gift It for mobile web

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 20:04:48 -0700

I’m excited to announce that we’ve just recently launched the full mobile web app, so now all Android and smartphone users can buy Giftlys and learn about their giftable occasions while on the go.

My Giftlys and mobile redemption have been available on mobile web for a month, but now Gift Watch and Gift It are available as well. We set out to make the mobile web version to be nearly identical to the iPhone app with some features optimized for the mobile web and we’re delighted by how close we came to making them match.

Check out the mobile web app here.

What's Gift Watch All About?

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 19:44:54 -0700

“Gift Watch is about making it easier to build and maintain relationships with the people you care about with a gift.” – Corianda Leste, head of user experience at Giftly

When we re-introduced Giftly 2-weeks ago, clearly there were a lot of design improvements that were the result our new designer, Corianda Leste, redesigning Giftly from the ground up.

Of equal importance to the changes in the design were the important changes to the product experience that reflect our learnings from the last year.

I’d like to call out one of those changes, which is embodied by an area of the app called Gift Watch:

On it’s surface, Gift Watch is a reminder and notification tool. It’s where you see Giftable Events happening in your friends lives right now. Once we came to deeply understand how people use gifts to connect and re-connect with the people they care about, we realized that we could do something much more useful than simply reminding users about their friends’ birthdays.

Gift Watch tells you about what your friends are up to and makes it easy to send a timely, contextual gift. So, if a friend checks-in at a Blowfish Sushi in San Francisco, I can send them a sushi roll. If I see they are at Monk’s Kettle, I can send them a beer. We believe this transforms the checkin, because now you can use that checkin to create a meaningful connection with your friend.

Surfacing checkins was one result of our realization that gifting is happening all the time. Gifts are exchanged frequently without explicitly thinking of them as a gift – it’s just a nice thing to do. For instance, when you’re at a cafe and you buy a friend a coffee, that’s a gift. Giflty makes it possible to do that even if you can’t be there physically to buy the coffee for them; Gift Watch helps make that easier by telling you when something is happening that you could use as an opportunity to send a gift.

Once we started using Gift Watch in the office, we were blown away by the results. First of all, we were checking in more… a lot more. Second, we were sending each other gifts in the morning and on the weekends. It became a fun way to connect, even inside the office.

Gift Watch is a tool to learn about events happening right now to the people you care about that you could use as an excuse to send them a gift. Right now, we’re showing friends’ birthdays and checkins but much, much more is already in the works.

Re-Introducing Giftly

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 08:58:25 -0700

For the last 6 months, we’ve been working on shaping the future of gifting. Today, we’re thrilled to unveil what we’ve made.

We created Giftly because we wanted a special way to stay connected to our friends and family that would go beyond just sending an electronic message and allow us to actually share an experience with them.

We wanted to make something that was beautiful and reliable. A tool that would make it easier to take advantage of how much we know about what people are doing and feeling on a given day.

So, we invented a new kind of gift. It’s a gift that not only works for birthdays, but also for everyday events, like when someone checks in at a restaurant. It’s a gift that allows you to give an experience and then share in that experience with the recipient. This elevates gifting beyond a transfer that ends after the gift is given, to an on-going, personal interaction.

How it works

A Giftly is not a gift card, it’s better. You can give a Giftly for any item or experience, at any place.

You can make a Giftly for dinner at a favorite restaurant, a sweater from a local boutique, ice cream at a nearby park, something you see in a store, or a night at the movies.

When you give a Giftly, you’ll tell the recipient what you’d like them get and where you’d like them to get it. We’ve created dozens of fun icons that you can use or you can use a photo of anything you’d like. The Giftly can be for any amount and be delivered via text, email or Facebook.

After you’ve bought a Giftly, you can see its status at any time in My Giftlys. You’ll get to know when they open it, where they used it, see what they got, and exchange messages.

As a recipient, after you open the Giftly, all you need to do is go and buy the intended gift at the place chosen by the gifter. (You don’t need to show anything to the merchant.) After you do, use the mobile app or website to indicate that you’ve used the Giftly and share where you went and what you got with the gifter. We credit the gifted amount directly to your credit card.

New-Fashioned Gifting

These past few months, we’ve been developing a new iPhone app that incorporates these ideas and is launching today. Click here to download it from the App Store.

We’ve now begun work on complimentary web and mobile web versions. We can’t wait to share more with you.

Hibernating

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 15:22:08 -0700

Giftly has been working on a better, more personal gifting product for more than a year now. We set our sights on gift cards —so widely-used, so commonly-disliked, so ripe for improvement with technology— and we were off to the races, developing many iterations of our ideas, getting them online, and seeing where our assumptions were correct and where we’d been mistaken.

We’ve also been learning about being a company: developing the culture we want and becoming the sort of business we admire, one that is honest, open, and determined to improve the lives of its customers.

We’ve learned so much, and we’re deeply excited to be putting that learning into some new work that we’ll release this spring. We think we’ve finally hit on the future of gifting, and we can’t wait to share it with you. As a result, we’re putting the entirety of the company’s focus and energy into development, and won’t be updating our blog or site as often.

We know that’s boring, but we also know it will be worth it. When we launch the next version of Giftly, you’ll be glad we marshaled all our resources to get make it awesome and get it out soon. We can’t wait!

Your Favorite Après Ski Spots

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:57:14 -0800

A few weeks ago, we asked you to tell us your favorite après ski bar for a chance to win a $100 Giftly to enjoy there this winter. And we have a winner! Congrats to Gina of San Francisco, whose favorite ski bar is 22 Bistro in Squaw Valley, for very legit reasons. “The Sweet Potato Fries are to die for. They have tons of beer options for beer lovers, and pour stiff cocktails for girls like me,” she writes on our Facebook page, “It’s a perfect place to warm-up after the day and exchange stories, or drink off a major afternoon spill while waiting for your friends. Also, it’s directly between the funitel and your car, making it an obvi stop on the way home.” And there you have it! Gina’s about to get tricked out at 22 Bistro!

Here are some more of your ski bar favorites, conveniently linked for the Giftly-ing.

“Big Powderhorn! Top 5 resorts in ‘da Midwest!”

“Le Chamois at Squaw! Best après ski spot hands down!

“PlumpJack Squaw Valley Inn! Enjoying a peppermint schnapps spiked hot-chocolate in front of their fireplace is lovely. You don’t even have to take off your boots since it’s at the bottom of the hill.”

“39 Degrees in Aspen, CO is the place to be. Now if only I could afford it =)”

“The StewPot in Snowmass, CO. Best soups and stews (and food, in general) ever!”

“Little Nell in Aspen. I don’t think anyone actually skis there, but everyone looks like Bergdorf Goodman outfitted them.”

“Best après in Vail is the Red Lion, live music and lots of outdoor seating right on Bridge Street.”

“Cottonwood. Winter storm warning drink specials, an award winning bar, a great burger, live music and Truckee vistas.”

Happy trails!

Celebrate, Anti-Valentine Style

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:21:31 -0800

Valentine’s Day cometh in less than three weeks, which is sweet if you’re in love and into lovey holidays. (In which case, we’ve got you covered here).

But if you’re single and a hater, now’s the time to prepare your barricade against that inevitable onslaught of saccharine.

Hiding with an ice cream pint is one option. But you can also rally your single ladies (or gents!) with a Giftly to join you in celebrating the holiday, Anti-Valentine style. For this, we’ve collected an arsenal of Valentine Hater Gift Ideas — you know, stuff like manis/pedis, pizza, stiff drinks — to jump start your V-Day hating plans.

Anti-Valentines unite!

Giftable Item of the Week: An Edward Sharpe "Home" Door Mat

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:07:21 -0800

Welcome to Giftly’s ‘Giftable Item of the Week.’ Every week, we’ll be bringing you an item we’ve come across in our travels that we think would make for a fabulous gift (aka, we totally want it).

Of songs featuring whistling intros, perhaps none is better suited for door mat placement than Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros’ 2009 feel-good (and heard everywhere) anthem “Home.“

And look at that! There she is on a cute-as-pie welcome mat, complete with a bird on it.

You can get your hands on one of these on Edward Sharpe’s Official Online Store (for $40). Pair it with a new-neighborhood exploration Giftly for the ultimate housewarming present for a newlywed couple.

-Jennifer Pollock

Creative Valentine's Day Cards Will Win You Points: A Few of Our Favorites

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:32:27 -0800

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. Avoid the last-minute (usually uninspired) slim pickings in the Hallmark card aisle and instead take the time to pick out a creative card for your sweetie. Trust us, thoughtful cards that bring a smile go a long way.

Here are a few of our favorite offerings this year:

“Valentine Sights” from Oddball Press.

“Extinct Love” from Oddball Press ($5.25)

“Me have big love” from Blue Barnhouse ($5.00)

“Notorious” from The Great Lakes ($4.00)

“Not sent from my iPhone” from Red Letter Paper Company ($4.00)

“Otter Love” from Night Owl Paper Company ($6.00)

“Booty Call” from Blue Barnhouse ($5.00)

“Freaking Ninja” from Colette Paperie ($3.50)

“But do you…” from The Great Lakes ($4.00)

“Happy F’ing Valentines” from Someecards ($9.99)

“Can’t hide my feelings” from Hello Lucky ($4.50)

“Uncle Jesse Valentine’s Day Card” from Colette Paperie ($3.50)

“My love has no bugs” from TheWallaroo ($3.50)

Check out all of our Valentine’s Day gift ideas, each specifically tailored to your city.

-Jennifer Pollock

Giftable Item of the Week: The Shower Curtain that Spoke To Dave Eggers

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:20:00 -0800

Inspiration can come from the strangest of places, striking at any time. It doesn’t even have to wait until you even have a pen or towel handy.

Each year The Thing Quarterly asks four writers, artists, musicians or filmmakers to “create a useful object that somehow incorporates text” into it, and so far guest editors have included such luminaries as Tucker Nichols, Jonathan Lethem and James Franco.

For the latest, they tapped Dave Eggers (see: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, What is the What, McSweeney’s, 826 Valencia, Pulitzer finalist, etc.)

So what does he come back with? A shower curtain. But hold the conditioner, this shower curtain has a clever monologue transcribed on it, with the idea, presumably, that one would read it while in the shower.

Interestingly, Dave claims that the words were told to him by his own shower curtain. So while I’m not sure if this can be actually be considered his own original work, at least he’s giving due credit.

You can get a subscription ($200 for 4 issues) to The Thing Quarterly — if you live in the Bay Area, you can even just pop into their store to pick up your object — or you can purchase the shower curtain separately ($65), but if past items are any indication, the curtains will be closing as this thing properly sells out.

-Nish Nadaraja

Great Gifting Boards on Pinterest

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:29:00 -0800

We’re now on Pinterest! We’re having tons of fun collecting gift ideas with the power to ignite some serious cases of Double Joy. Follow us there (as well as on our Gift Ideas section on Giftly) to gather some gifting inspiration. We’ll be pinning stuff we love there daily.

We’re new to Pinterest, so we want to give a shout out to some of the gifting boards that have been inspiring us so far. Here’s who we’ve been pursuing daily:

Kate Woodrow has a great board called “presents” where she pins everything from morse code blankets to extra-personalized housewarming gifts to awesome DIY packaging ideas for dad.

Morse code blankets.

Custom house portraits by Rebekka Seale

DIY for dad.

We love Rachel Cox’s quirky pins on her board “Gifts.” She’s found some especially impressive presents for photographers, like this Nikon lens coffee mug and a camera cake.

Jacque Burton has over 100 pins in her “gifts” board, and they’re all awesome. She has an great eye for gifts for kids, toddlers and babies. Oh, and who wouldn’t want a jellyfish tank for their desk?

A giraffe height chart.

A custom placemat of your neighborhood.

A desktop jelly fish tank.

Etsy has an entire board dedicated to Gift Ideas, which is a one-stop shop if you’re looking for something handmade. Some of our favorites:

For a coworker.

For someone who realllllyyyyy likes pizza.

Have gifting boards you love on Pinterest? Let us know in the comments so we can follow them!

-Jennifer Pollock