Built With You In Mind

To&From will change how you think about gifting, forever.

by Bridget Johns

31st May, 2022

This is the essence of To&From - “built with you in mind”. For years I was frustrated by the lack of innovation in the online gifting experience. I love to gift, but as the ways we shop and discover products have evolved it struck me that gifting hadn’t kept up with the times. Which is a shame, and an opportunity! With a career deep in retail and technology solutions, I started thinking about ways to do things differently and I kept coming back to the same question… “why IS it so hard”. As I explored this question, it was clear there was no universal answer. Retailers would say it was because they didn’t have great tools to manage the experience. Consumers, on the other hand, would give me wildly different answers. “My wife is soooo picky, she never likes anything I buy her.” “My husband buys himself everything he wants.” “I never know what to buy my son’s teachers and I hate giving them a gift card, it feels so impersonal.” “I never remember.” or my personal favorite, “I tell my husband I don’t want him to buy me a gift because I don’t want him to see my disappointment when I don’t like it.” If you are still reading, I assume one or more of these sentiments resonate with you. The truth is, gifting IS hard because relationships are hard, and they are complex, they are nuanced and they change over time. These are the things To&From seeks to solve for you - in a different way for every relationship, every occasion and every budget.

You Deserve More: Do you hate how search works today? We hate it too. The current experience to find a great gift for a person or occasion takes any ounce of joy you might have had about buying a gift for someone and turns it into a mind-numbing task. Even the brands that know a lot about your shopping preferences can’t help - because they only know about you and what you want, not what someone else might like. Well, we changed that. At To&From, we already know you are buying a gift so we built a marketplace to do just that - help you find a great gift based on what someone else might like! Everything in our platform is oriented around the idea that with a little bit of information, we can get a lot better at recommending gifts. We start with understanding the relationship and occasion and then refine the recommendations from there. You can tell us as little or as much as you want about who you are buying for and we will give you great choices. It’s honestly that easy. We have curated over 5,000 great gifts primarily across women’s accessories, home goods and lifestyle products. (p.s. We have a few things for the men too and will be adding more over time). We curated products mainly from brands that you can’t normally find on Amazon or on other larger retailers - these are really cool brands, with awesome products. We hope you agree!

You Also Need Better Tools: The second pain point in gifting is having practical tools to make your life easier. We think these tools start with a basic understanding of who you gift for and when those occasions are. With this information we can deliver the reminders and recommendations that you need to get it right. Over time, the more you interact with the platform, the more gifts you buy, the smarter we get about the gifts that will make you a hero! With our Gifting HQ you can organize all of your gifting needs by Giftee. Lets take my sister, for example. Once I add her and add her birthday and Christmas (the two occasions I typically buy her gifts), I start to get recommendations under her name. I can add a price filter to only get gifts that are in my budget and I can add bookmarks for things I think she might like that may not be in our system. And guess what? She can even tell me what she wants - when she sets up her own bookmarks, she can send me her Giftlist which guarantees me I’ll get her something she wants! Overtime I can keep track of what I’ve purchased, I can see what my brother bought her, and so on. It’s gifting genius.

What Comes Next: We have been working on To&From for about a year and are really proud of the product that we are launching with, but honestly it’s about 10% of what we ultimately want to build. We think of To&From as the Heart of Your Gifting Life, and we hope you start to think of it that way too. For us this means meeting you wherever and whenever you are in your gifting life. Thank you for being here now, and please keep coming back to see what is next!

Happy Gifting,

Bridget
CEO & Co-founder
To&From



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