Overview

For every $10 the average American spends, $1 is spent on buying someone a gift. The global digital gifting market is expected to grow to USD 180 billion by 2025.

Knowing that gifts in business strengthen relationships, Brendan Kamm, Co-Founder of Thnks, saw an opportunity to create a better gifting system for the Fortune 500 that would enable enterprise team leaders to more easily build strong relationships, both internally and with clients and prospects, while remaining in compliance with corporate gifting policies.

The Thnks team commissioned Blood & Treasure to build the first version of its enterprise-focused digital gifting platform with the following functionality:

• Curated gift catalog with multiple vendor integrations, including iTunes and Amazon
• Ability to import contacts and create personalized gifting messages
• iOS and Android mobile interfaces
• Ability to deliver digital gifts instantly via email or SMS
• Ability to seamlessly accept gifts with no app install or account creation, or donate gifts to charity
• Client side web portal with secure client login, management oversight, and platform analytics

It was crucial to make it easy for enterprise leaders to monitor, track, set goals for, and report on all of the gifts coming into and out of an organization to ensure compliance with the gift-giving policies of each corporation.

As Brendan explained at the outset: "The application must provide enterprise leadership with the ability to set KPI goals against corporate gifting and to track ROI on those costs."

Following our human-centered design process, we created detailed wireframes to first reveal and then optimize the experience we wanted users to have at every step of the flow, from the perspective of the sender of a gift, their recipient, and a client admin.

With completed wireframes in hand, the next steps were to analyze each task in Jira and write the API document and data schema in preparation for going into code.

Development of the first iteration of the product, or MVP (Minimum Viable Product), was completed within 3 months.

Initially we were using TangoCard to manage most vendor integrations, however we soon needed to integrate Amazon's API to allow users to gift directly from the Amazon store.

This turned out to be more difficult than expected as we needed access to Amazon's private API which at that time Amazon was reluctant to open to a start-up.

While waiting for Amazon to approve our application, we continued to use their public API and implemented a fallback checkout process with instructions and a simplified gift presentation.

Within a few months of launch, Thnks had signed agreements with several major accounts including American Express, Facebook and Buzzfeed.

Today, Thnks is the only relationship building management system developed for sales, finance and HR professionals. It is not another gift card, but a personalized digital gift sent with a few easy swipes on a mobile device.

In a similar way to how Seamless simplified the corporate lunch, Thnks is modernizing enterprise gifting by simplifying the act of showing gratitude allowing clients to send thoughtful gestures of appreciation like a cup of coffee, a bottle of wine, or a rideshare instantly via email or text message.