GiftWell is providing guests and hosts with a modern solution to the hassles and awkwardness of gift-giving and receiving. Founder Marta Barbayannis explains her inspiration behind the app from her own experiences.
Marta first noticed the need for a smoother way of gift-giving after attending weekly birthday parties with her young children, along with many weddings and other events. She found that, on such a regular basis, the fun of gift-giving soon becomes a stress.
When the gift of giving becomes a pain
“Life admin can be stressful and relentless,” says Marta. “The task of thinking of the perfect gift, sourcing it, buying it, being home when it’s delivered, or braving the madness of shopping centres, wrapping it and writing a card to go with it is actually very time-consuming and often inconvenient.”
She’s hit the nail on the head: attending birthdays, weddings and other events can quickly lose its magic with the added last minute stress of finding the right present at the right price. Who hasn’t found themselves trying to track down some cash and stuffing it in a card on the way to a wedding or birthday?
Marta was inspired to create GiftWell to facilitate a stress free gift-giving process to help people celebrate milestones of family and friends. The free app lets hosts to create a ‘campaign’, whether it be a wedding, engagement, birthday, baby shower or other occasion, and allows guests to securely send a monetary gift and a personalised message.
Is GiftWell driving a cultural shift?
Marta began noticing an interesting cultural tension around asking for money as a gift over material presents. Marta unabashedly explains the current gifting etiquette: “Everyone wants cash, but not everyone feels comfortable enough to ask for it.”
Asking for cash in our society comes across as greedy and rude. Giving cash in situations where material gifts are the norm is interpreted as lazy. But, as Marta explains, we’re in a time when many of us want for nothing, and if anything we have too much stuff. Especially from an environmental perspective, our gift-buying habits are giving more people things they don’t need, and contributing more and more waste. We’re making more sustainable choices in many aspects of our life, it’s time to introduce this same ethos to gifting. We need to seriously reassess our gift-giving norms, particularly with kids’ parties.
We’re a society obsessed with stuff
“A lot of kids these days have everything. Their rooms are perfectly styled and filled with beautiful books and toys. They don’t actually need a lot. My boys are at their happiest when things are kept simple,” says Marta about the modern environment our kids are growing up in.
Rather than adding to the mountain of coloured plastic children’s toys filling many family homes, gifts for children could be an opportunity to begin teaching them the value of money, or to put the money towards a larger, more meaningful gift. Compare getting ten different kinds of Nerf Guns or three lots of Hungry Hippos to saving up for something they really want! Less clutter and toys in children’s lives has proven to help their focus and creativity.
You don’t have to eliminate the exciting present-opening experience altogether, but GiftWell can massively reduce the amount of smaller gifts in exchange for a lump sum to be put towards a more meaningful purchase or easily transferred into a savings account.
At the moment, GiftWell operates as free to download, with a small admin fee of $1.50 for gift-givers as well as Paypal’s nominal fee. GiftWell looks forward to adding more payment gateways to allow others who aren’t Paypal users to enjoy the ease of gifting with GiftWell.
Download GiftWell today for your next occasion.
