Goody Is Making Gift-Giving As Easy As Sending A Text

In the last year, online gift-giving has dramatically increased in big part due to the pandemic. According to Google Insights, the search term “online gift” increased over 80% from 2019-2020. In another study, personalized gifts were estimated at $25.8 Billion globally in 2020 while the entire industry is expected to reach $43.3 billion by 2027. With online gift giving on the rise, one serial entrepreneur wanted to make it even easier and more convenient for people to send and receive gifts. 

Edward Lando saw an opportunity to make gifting a seamless and pleasant experience for both the gift giver and the receiver. Goody allows a gift giver to send a gift to a recipient without knowing their address, tastes, size, preference, etc. All the giver needs to have is the recipient’s phone number. The gift giver can select a gift option in the Goody app to give to the recipient, but once the recipient accepts the gift, they can either accept the gift or choose a totally different gift that they might enjoy even more. Once the recipient approves their gift of choice, they enter their address and a confirmation is sent to the sender that their gift is on the way. The process takes the awkwardness out of asking what someone likes or dislikes, returning or exchanging gifts and prying for addresses when the gift is a surprise. 

“Gifting is a ritual that has been around for as long as we have been around. Today, it has become  incredibly time-intensive and difficult to pick out a gift for the people in your life. Goody makes sending a gift 100x less frictionful, which we believe will dramatically increase how often people are willing to send gifts to each other in the  form of a message. Before us, all of the options that existed were either not pleasant to use or required you to know the recipient’s address, their sizes, their preferences. Goody takes all of that away,” shared Lando. “We have also found an opportunity to facilitate warmth in human connection through gift giving.  We are a messaging company just as much as we are an e-commerce company. So to some extent, we have benefitted from the dramatic improvement in mobile consumer experiences. Everything from the layout and the feel of the app to the way senders and recipients interact and get notified.”  

Lando prides himself on making gifting easy through messaging. “Goody can take you 10 seconds to send a gift. Pick a product, choose a card, choose someone from your address book (or enter their number) and boom! They have their gift! And you get to have the thrill of following when they open it and reading their thank you message to you. We also have an amazing product selection. We have a world class partnerships team that works day and night to get the very best brands on the platform as gifting partners. Both brands that you have heard about and ones that you haven’t but will be delighted to discover. Finally, we are obsessed with customer service and the customer experience. We see ourselves as a premium concierge gifting layer that makes shopping for the people you love as easy and fun as it can be.”

The app features different occasions and categories of gifts to choose from such as birthdays, baby, pets, home, sympathy, food and even experiences. Many of the brands featured are new up and coming brands with a mix of household names. The team at Goody chooses brands to partner with based on all of the different life cases they want to cover in gifting. This is through a mix of what they hear speaking with their  customers every day and their own intuition. “We actively reach out to brands that we think are a great fit to be on our platform, particularly if they are small to medium-sized emerging companies that we think deserve broader attention and that our customers will love. It’s a win-win here because we help these brand partners get more distribution and we introduce exciting new products to our customers. Additionally, brands reach out to us every day — from your cool new LA or NY based healthy food company to mainstream names that everyone in America knows,” Lando shared.Many of the brands featured on Goody are up and coming female founded brands such as Deux Cookie Dough, Brightland, Yumi, Hedley and Bennet, Dieux, Ceremonia, Ilia, Copina Co. and more. 

Since their launch in late 2020, the app has seen thousands of downloads with month over month growth. The Goody team is continuing to expand their brand offerings, user experience and offerings to their users. “Given that we love gifts, you won’t be surprised to hear that we love surprises. We have some very fun new product releases coming up. Overwhelmingly, our customers ask us for ways to embed Goody even more into their lives and to make it easy to track the major life moments of those they care about to be able to be there at the right time. We are not just a shopping product. We are a way to keep your most meaningful relationships warm.” said Lando. 

The app is available for download for Apple and Android as well as customized gifting for large corporate accounts.