We Have Exceeded $10M In Annual Revenue, Delivering Personal & Corporate Gifts to 200+ Countries [Update]
This is a follow up story for GiftBasketsOverseas.com. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 3 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
My name is Dmitriy Peregudov, I am the founder and Chief Gift Officer for Gift Baskets Overseas, DrinkableGifts, and associated brands.
I think of myself as a relationship enabler within and outside the company. Our company helps people connect with important people in their lives and build lasting, meaningful relationships.
Since the last time, we connected with StarterStory on our Corporate Gifting business, our company has grown significantly and further focused on the Business gifting segment.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
The team has grown to 95 people in 27 countries Worldwide, while revenue exceeded $10M annually.
The COVID pandemic was an opportune time when people couldn’t travel to connect and relied on alternative ways to build relationships. This is where our services became more needed than ever - we could hardly keep up with demand.
While the demand has calmed a bit since that time, we are still seeing a significant change in consumer behavior and have gained the trust of many more customers. After all, doing what we do (delivering gifts in 200+ countries Worldwide) isn’t easy, and our team can make this happen quickly and reliably.
Our team launched several new brands, including DrinkableGifts focusing on wine & alcohol gift delivery Worldwide and CakesOverseas for Cakes & Birthday gifts.
These new additions, along with our Core Brands: GiftBasketsOverseas and GoodChoiceFlowers (Worldwide florist), complete our current brand portfolio.
Our marketing team has been restructured to grow our leading brands adequately - we now have specialists and generalists.
Each brand is led by a dedicated brand manager responsible for multi-channel success. At the same time, SEM/SEO efforts are centralized and spearheaded by specialists in their respective areas. This setup allows us to maintain our product-specific, geographically distributed brands while keeping best practices standardized and dispersed throughout the organization.
Separately our Reseller Program has gained popularity - with our new International Gifting API, our Worldwide gift catalog is now open to integrating with Mobile Apps, Dating Platforms, Marketplaces, and platforms. Other integration options are also available, with data-feed integration available in XML and CSV.
Resellers receive a 20%+ discount to grow alongside GiftBasketsOverseas.com.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
Hiring great people is never easy, and last year was no exception. We have a strong team culture, and our hiring is on a cultural fit in addition to the skill set requirements. This makes us very picky, and we take our time in welcoming newcomers to our family.
We’ve also been increasingly challenged by seasonality in our business. Our seasonal sales are incredibly healthy, while the mid-year lows are sometimes painful. We are still using this time to recharge, prepare our tools, and re-polish processes for the next holiday season.
We’ve learned over the years that focusing on doing one small niche really well helps us perfect it.
Consistently engaging our growing team cross-border is also a non-trivial task. When some of your team is in South Africa, France, and Thailand and then scattered across Ukraine, Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil - it gets tricky to keep us connected.
Our HR manager Dasha is actively planning our International team-building trips each year.
The recent one occurred in Mexico: we rented several villas in Cancun. We gathered to talk about togetherness in our company and learned about each other individually and professionally.
This year’s locations include Colombia, Thailand, and another in Eastern Europe (yet to be decided). These trips are an integral part of our company’s DNA, we love seeing each other in person and learning from one another.
The year 2022 was challenging for our company: with some of our team members in Russia and Ukraine, we were actively helping our team relocate to other parts of the world where our team members were welcoming their co-workers and friends.
At the same time, the team in Ukraine and worldwide was busy with Charitable efforts to help elderly Ukrainian people in need, wherever we had connections.
We embrace peace and openly condemn the Russian military action in Ukraine since the first days of the Russian invasion. Read more details about our efforts in Ukraine here.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
As part of our growth journey, we’ve learned about the customers’ needs outside of E-commerce and launched our SaaS offering: Corporate Gifting Platform Giftsenda two years ago. At the time of launch, our experience has been primarily on Gift delivery, logistics, and customer experience.
We’ve since ventured into Software implementation and software sales process and learned a lot in the process. This is certainly a new area for the team to continue growing in 2023 and beyond.
Most importantly: we’ve learned to offer our gifting service to the new customer base - customers who want to accelerate their pipeline and grow sales with personalized gifting. Giftsenda is now equipped to handle all that with easy CRM integrations with Salesforce, Hubspot, Gmail, and other tools.
Separately Google algorithms presented new challenges, and luckily our custom E-commerce platform was flexible in responding. We’ve improved the load speed of our website by more than 40% and continue looking at ways to speed up user experience with all of our websites.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year and the next five years?
We believe 2023-2024 is an opportune time for us to continue focusing on corporate gift senders and develop solutions to automate the process while offering more personalized gift options.
At the same time, our consumer gift senders started asking for a Gifting App with important features to make International gifting easier, so our tech team is working on this alongside the Marketing organization.
Both consumer and business gift senders will also appreciate our soon-to-be-launched Giftbucks Loyalty Program, which allows them to receive gifts themselves as a reward for being generous.
We are proud to say that our customer base is extremely loyal, with over 70% of our business coming from returning customers and recurring orders. We have a pretty good idea about what our customers want. With “improvement” being one of our core values, we will continue perfecting what we do best - help people build relationships over the distance through gifting.
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
I love the HBR Idea Cast podcast and an overall fan of the Case Study section offered in every HBR magazine.
About a year ago, I read the book by the Zappos founder Tony Hsieh “Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose”, it became a playbook for our cultural growth and team development.
Additionally, I recommend a book by Bill Flynn “Further, Faster: The Vital Few Steps That Take the Guesswork out of Growth” - it helped us streamline our sales process and understand our customer's needs.
Bill is also a business consultant who helped our leadership team to polish our process and define our culture.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their businesses?
Focus, focus, focus: we’ve learned over the years that concentrate on doing one small niche well helps us perfect it. This is the ultimate way to compete with a big business out there. Once you master that one thing, you could think of layering some expansion while maintaining your core competency and focus.
Your journey has many turns, and it’s easy to lose track and get sidetracked in the wrong direction. While this may be exciting for an entrepreneur to dive into something new: sometimes staying laser-focused is more important.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
As our gifting brand portfolio has grown recently, so has our Marketing team.
We are looking for an SEO / Search Analytics person to join our growing team. As usual, we seek a self-starter who can bring their unique knowledge while naturally blending with our culture.
We also hire people seasonally into our multilingual Customer Experience team, so if you’re looking to experience an exciting yet challenging work environment - we would love to hear from you.
GiftBasketsOverseas is About Connecting People
Where can we go to learn more?
- Websites: Gift Baskets Overseas , drinkablegifts , cakesoverseas, goodchoiceflowers
- Gifting Platform
- Our blog
- Long Distance Short - our Podcast
- Youtube
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
Hey! 👋 I'm Pat Walls, the founder of Starter Story.
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