Irish gifting platform &Open has opened a new on-demand marketplace, making its services more accessible, particularly for smaller enterprises.
The Dublin-based company opened a waiting list for the service earlier this year. More than 1,000 companies have joined in advance of the official launch of &Open On-Demand.
“The wait list has been quietly growing throughout the last few months,” said co-founder Jonathan Legge. “This is a really exciting new chapter for us because it moves us beyond being able to serve a fairly niche part of the gifting space with corporate gifting to allow us to support, fundamentally, any company that wants to gift.”
Companies can sign up, choose the gifts they want to send and only pay for those that are redeemed. The lack of a monthly subscription fee allows companies to continue to send gifts to staff, customers or other parties while also keeping a tight grip on costs at a time when businesses may be feeling the pinch from rising prices.
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“In the current economic headwinds, it’s the perfect product for the times as well,” said Mr Legge. “If people are cautious, it allows them to proceed with gifting in a very, very controlled manner with no upfront fees. So it’s really helpful from a business perspective.”
The on-demand product will also provide a platform for emerging brands, local vendors, causes and subscription services.
Customers can search for gifts from more than 250 options, filtering them according to gifts or suppliers that align with their values, such as supporting woman-owned companies or sustainably sourced gifts.
Founded in 2017 by Ciara Flood and Jonathan and Mark Legge, &Open’s corporate gifting platform is aimed at making it easier for brands to send curated, responsibly sourced gifts to customers to boost loyalty and engagement and improve customer retention. It handles the process on behalf of the sender and offers data to clients through a reporting dashboard that outlines the performance of each campaign, inventory and feedback from recipients.
The launch of the on-demand service comes after a funding round in June that raised $26 million for the company to expand its operations and to open a US office.
“There is no more debate; every business is gifting. They’re all just doing it at different scales for different cohorts or in different verticals,” Mr Legge said. “We have a product that has a wonderful horizontal solution that’s suitable for all those different verticals. That’s what’s really exciting about our future, what’s really exciting about what on-demand brings to the spectrum as well because it keeps us moving in all those verticals, but also it gives us a solution that’s applicable to any size of business.”
Despite the shift in economic outlook in recent months, Mr Legge said &Open’s business was going strong. One area that has grown significantly is employee gifting, which now accounts for 40 per cent of the business.
“We have so many customers now using us to help them with gifting their employees, from Intercom to Airbnb,” he said. “All of them are looking for ways to nurture and care, and stay connected with what’s fundamentally a remote workforce in a hyper-digital world where it’s really hard to keep all that cohesion together.”
