Often people are confused about the gifts they want to give to their friends or relatives on their special occasions. Finding the perfect gift is a combination of knowing the personality of the person, their interests, and crucially, their age. They are not able to decide an appropriate gift for them and always end up buying greeting cards/flowers/chocolates. To solve this problem and to help them find the perfect gift, ISB alumni and a serial entrepreneur Shruti Dhanda, founded a startup called Shoptosurprise which brings together all the gift products available in Indian market on a single platform. S2S aims to become the pocket Gifting buddy of every Indian.
Shoptosurprise is an easy-going, cool startup, with a team size of 8, set out to revolutionise the Gifting space by showcasing some out-of-the box and rather interesting Gifts. They source a range of products from entire India and a lot of products that are designed and developed by our own two hands inside our houses. They have everything for all the age groups- flowers, chocolates, perfumes, cards, corporate-gifts. The company aims to provide some amazing options to the customers and wish to make the gifting experience lavishing and memorable.
S2S is currently following an Online + Offline(Corporates, Retail Outlets) model, so that they give full freedom to their customers when it comes to buying Gift Products.
The main idea of the startup is to sell products/services through concepts. Concepts like – Something Out of Nothing, where they sell some innovative Gifts which have been developed in house. Also, they have listed the steps of creating the Gifts, so that if you have some free time, you can manage to make those Gifts. Likewise, they have 16 running concepts on the site currently. They also display some unique sections like hall of fame and blow a wish.
Hall of fame allows people to share their best gifting experience and awards the title of Genie/Wizard of the week. Blow a wish allows the customer to write their wish in beautiful writing on the card of their choice and send it. The website is an important part of marketing strategy.
The website currently has 250-400 unique visits per day. They receive almost 5 orders/day and have successfully made ~300 customers happy till date. The major traffic is from metro cities such as Delhi and Mumbai.
They also have Retail Stores in Greater Noida, where the customer can walk in and pick a product. They are in process of opening a retail store in Dehradun.
Gifting is a 12,000 Crore Market and is expected to grow exponentially, since the disposable income is on a rise. Their competitors in market include Chumbak and Happilyunmarried. Though these are not particularly into Gifting, they provide some out of the box products to the customers which poses a threat to other gifting related markets.
The S2S team is also coming up with an app that will keep a check on the upcoming events and occasions for the customer. It will also throw appropriate suggestions depending on customers’ purchase patterns and preferences. Prototype of the app is complete and functional.
Also, their crowd funding project – Creative Floor, will be live in a couple of days. The team wishes to open a place where people can walk in and create any real product. The supervision and materials will be provided by S2S.
