London-based SwiftGift today launched the beta version of its social online gifting platform to allow users to send real gifts to anyone even without knowing their postal address. The launch coincides with the holiday season, the ideal time to tackle a huge problem of gift giving: “where do I send the package?” In two simple steps, a consumer can use www.SwiftGift.me to send gifts to anyone by simply knowing their name and identifying their Facebook profile within the platform.
With SwiftGift, users select a gift from the online marketplace, with options ranging from £5 chocolates to £20,000 diamond-encrusted iPhones. After check-out, SwiftGift sends a private message to the recipient, asking them to accept the gift and inviting them to provide the address where they would like it delivered. The gift is then dispatched by SwiftGift’s trusted merchant partners directly to the recipient, arriving in beautiful SwiftGift packaging, along with a personalised card.
SwiftGift places extra emphasis on privacy and security—all recipients’ information is kept strictly private in the Company’s proprietary database of masked addresses.
Founder and CEO Kirill Chliaifchtein explains that SwiftGift’s mission is to “establish new standards of social communication where sending a real gift is just as effortless, yet more meaningful, than a Facebook message, ‘poke’ or ‘like’. By enabling people to send gifts more easily, we believe that people’s gifting behavior will shift from being primarily ‘event driven’ to more ‘mood driven,’ whereby gifts are not only sent on special occasions but at any time to express feelings, or even just to say ‘thinking of you’.”
SwiftGift, has been in stealth development since its founding in 2013. Development has taken place across five countries and with the aid of experts in social consumer behavior. To date, the company has received over £400,000 in angel funding, and is currently closing another extension to its seed round. By the end of 2015, SwiftGift plans to expand internationally to key markets such as the United States and continental Europe.
