How Do You Send Gifts to 10+ People?

I’ve been catching up on Shark Tank recently, and there was a pitch that reminded me of an idea I had a while ago that I never pursued. It’s more of a problem that I’m hoping you’ll tell me has already been solved.

In 2015 and 2016, my company, Stonemaier Games, sent out holiday gifts to many of our valued partners as a token of our gratitude. However, it took a lot of time. I’m pretty sure my business partner and I combined to take care of it in 2015, and in 2016 I actually hired someone just to take care of this, as we were sending somewhere around 30-40 gifts around the world.

So in November of 2017 when we talked about it, we had so many other things going on that we decided it wasn’t a priority. It wasn’t for lack of gratitude–we frequently thank our partners. We just didn’t have the time.

The issue is that as far as I can tell, there’s no single-serving website that lets you do the following:

  1. enter your total budget
  2. select the category of gift (chocolate, fruit, wine, etc)
  3. upload a single spreadsheet with worldwide addresses
  4. finalize your gift selections based on the budget as it relates to the number of recipients and where they’re located
  5. the website checks with the recipients to confirm their addresses (heck, it would be even easier if you could just enter their e-mails and the website would request their mailing addresses)
  6. checkout and be done

While I was writing this, I realized that some websites come closer than I thought (Harry and David, for example, might allow a spreadsheet upload of addresses to your address book). But none offer the optimal ease of use, which I believe is what I described above. For a task that can take 10+ hours, this system–especially if you only had to enter e-mails–could take as little as 10 minutes.

 

Perhaps, though, you’ve already found this solution. Or perhaps sending gifts to 10+ people all at once is rarer than I think. What’s your take on this?

2 thoughts on “How Do You Send Gifts to 10+ People?”

  1. One site that might fit your bill is https://www.giftsnideas.com/
    Then again, speaking of Shark Tank, IF you ever wanted to go on that show yourself, to ask for a relatively small amount of money for a small percent of Stonemaier Games, and you targeted Sharks Mark Cuban and/or Kevin O’Leary for their back-office capabilities, they might like to make a deal. That could result in a side effect of gifts being chosen from companies they have already invested in, and the service you describe added to one or more of those companies. (In fact, the idea of an umbrella service to do what you describe for all the companies in which they have invested MIGHT appeal to them!) The Shark Tank exposure would, of course, bring Stonemaier Games to the attention of a huge audience. On your end, that’s a heavy solution to a relatively light problem, I know, but it’s fun to think about you/Stonemaier Games on Shark Tank and, as they say, ‘One thing leads to another.’

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