SendAFriend

Tyler Macke

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SendAFriend is an American stuffed animal care packages company. The company was founded in 2018 by Tyler Macke.

The 'Someone Loves You' package! Send a stuffed animal to your friends, family, or that special someone. Free US shipping.

Company History

Tyler Macke details the beginnings of their company in their Starter Story interview: (source)

Q: How did you get started on SendAFriend?

I got started in the world of business when I was 13 or 14 years old and first found Photoshop. At the time, all I was trying to accomplish was some YouTube banners and profile pictures for my gaming friends. However, that quickly grew into me learning Illustrator, After Effects, and picking up more design skills every day.

By age 15, I was creating professional logos, social media branding, advertisements, videos, and more. With this, I was growing a bit of a personal Twitter network in the gaming and graphic design community. This is when my first real business came to fruition -- a sticker printing business called StickerGrub created out of a desire to get some of my work printed as a physical product.

During high school, I kept up with StickerGrub and graphic design work in my free time. I partnered with different influencers and started freelancing with companies and agencies. With this, I quickly found my passion for brand development and entrepreneurship as a whole. I found how much I love the startup stage of a business and creating experiences for people. Most of all, during my senior year, I decided college was not the path for me because of these different experiences. After high school graduation, I doubled down and focused on making an entrepreneurial career for myself.

A lot of different gigs and opportunities manifested the year or so after I graduated. A few of these opportunities had me working with large e-commerce brands, and I had realized that most of my favorites lacked a philanthropic purpose. For some reason, the idea of building such a large brand with little-to-no benefit to others didn’t make sense to me. So, I set out to create something different, and that’s when SendAFriend was born.

When developing SendAFriend, I never had a clear “Aha! Problem solved!” kind of moment. However, the general desire to give back while doing my own thing predominantly led to the creation of the business. I knew I would never feel good about building a business that didn’t have these kinds of values, so that was my focus, and thus the brand was born.

Source (source)

Technology

They use Zendesk for their customer service. Slack, Google Suite, and Notion for their productivity. Smile.io for their reviews.

They use Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok for their social media.

Company History

Technology

References