Why we built Gifton.
In Korea, item-specific digital gifting has been a multi-billion-dollar market for over a decade. (See KakaoTalk Gift.) Nobody has adapted it for US local merchants. The legal, technical, and operational details are finicky, and most US gift-card platforms have settled into a comfortable shape that doesn't serve independent businesses.
We want gifting in the US to feel less like a fallback and more like "I picked this because of you."
A latte means "I know you." A dollar amount doesn't.
Specific gifts carry information. Receiving a latte at a place you love is different from receiving five dollars with a card emoji — the gift itself shows that the giver paid attention.
For the merchant, it's also a different relationship. Getting orders for *their* thing — not being a generic stop on a fungible-dollar gift card — connects the gift to the work they do.
Chains don't need us. Independents have been left out.
Large chains have their own gift programs. They've had them for years. The independents — the cafe on the corner, the bakery you love, the pottery studio that doesn't have a website — have been left without one.
We're recruiting one shop at a time because we want the merchants on Gifton to be ones we'd send our own friends to. That's slower. It's the point.