It is now widely accepted that customers and employees who receive corporate gifts end up appreciating the brand much more and with a lower outlay. Therefore, the market for this has exploded. A market player, the New York-based company Fastwhich has raised over $125 million to date, is now acquiring covera corporate merchandise gifting platform. Terms were not disclosed, although britcommerce understands the deal involved a combination of cash and stock.
Covver was previously backed by TLV Partners, based in Tel Aviv, Israel, and has raised $7 million to date. It specializes in swag-style products for businesses and also offers points-based recognition solutions for employees. It also personalizes products britcommerceally. So, for example, someone could send me a swag with my job title (General Editor) and the system would britcommerceally create a swag with my job title, no graphic design required.
In an interview with britcommerce, Hani Goldstein, co-founder and CEO of Snappy, said that Covver’s experience in gifting and enterprise store solutions complements Snappy’s ability to offer these types of gifting experiences, and that the platforms are would unify, and Cover would effectively become the “swag channel” on Snappy’s platform.
“What Covver built was an incredible article experience that is powered by AI and does it extremely well and innovatively,” he said. “They were specializing in loot. “So we feel like this solution can take all the magic of personalization and bring it to the combined world of how we do gifting better, to become the leading gifting platform worldwide.”
“There are about $50 billion worth of gift cards in the United States alone,” he added. “The world of corporate gifting is worth around $260 billion. But people don’t know what to buy, so they use gift cards. So that offers options, right? But that gets very transactional. It’s like ‘Hey, Mike, here’s 100 bucks!’ But I wanted to make you feel delighted. So what we want to do is make gifting easy, but keep the magic and personalization.”
In a statement, Roee Hemed, CEO of Covver, said: “By joining forces with Snappy, we are unlocking new possibilities for our customers, including expanded product solutions and the ability to leverage Snappy’s trusted gifting platform.”
Snappy first launched on britcommerce in 2016 as a consumer app and accelerated its progress until it eventually raised funding from investors such as Notable Capital, Hearst Ventures, Qumra, 83 North, and other venture capitalists.
It claims to have more than 47% of Fortune 100 companies, such as Microsoft, Amazon and Comcast, as clients.
However, it has competitors. Sendoso has raised $152.7 million to date, Postcard increase $46 million, with Dublin-based corporate gifting platform &Open raising $26 million in 2022.