Since 2015, Torrance Hart has been building a brand that does “corporate gifting, but better.” The “better” part of that mantra refers to the lengths Hart goes to in order to understand each customer’s stressors and dreams before coming up with an effortless, enjoyable, and impactful gifting experience. Teak & Twine is a gift box company born from deep attention to detail and an instinct for empathy.
While that may seem like a tedious (and maybe even exhausting) task, taking the time to understand people and scenarios is not new for Torrance. Before life in the gifting biz, she served as an intelligence officer in the US Air Force, where gathering info and sweating over the small stuff is a standard part of the role.
In that time, the idea of making gifting easier, more beautiful, and more thoughtful inspired her — and the rest is history. Teak & Twine was founded with a bend toward wedding gifts, but when a bride asked if she could use the same service for 150 holiday gifts at her tech company, it was a bona fide Aha! Moment.
After a decade in the gift box business, Torrance now leads a team of 20 women across the US who are all dedicated to making creative and intentional gifts that strengthen relationships, build loyalty, and leave lasting impressions.
But with a growing roster of clients ranging from small startups to Fortune 500 companies (and mounting awareness as Teak & Twine continues to make Best Of lists), there was an increasingly nagging problem: the manual process of corporate gifting.
The Problem: So Many Gift Orders, Not Enough Time
Teak & Twine found its footing in the corporate gifting space. The sprawling catalog of curated gift boxes stands out from the more traditional corporate gifts of yore, like pens, lanyards, stress balls, and other tchotchkes of that ilk.
Torrance herself asked, “Who decided corporate gifting had to be stiff? We’re trying to shake things up.”
These curated boxes are packed with popular products that are just as exciting to gawk at in their perfect in-box arrangement as they are to eat, use, or enjoy. Curious gifters in a crunch can peruse and purchase an impressive variety of ready-to-ship boxes, and those people who plan way ahead of schedule have more customized options at their disposal.
The range of goods, themes, and prices are fit for pretty much any recipient, occasion, and budget, so it’s no surprise that these gift boxes are a hot commodity for gifters looking to make a splash.
All of this seems like a dream for a founder like Torrance. A product she’s passionate about, customers that love it, an endless stream of good vibes and new gifters; it should all add up to an endlessly scalable company, right?
“Bulk gifting was a highly manual process,” Hart remembers. “Clients had to submit recipient details through spreadsheets, and our team managed everything through lots of emails! Our biggest challenge was the time and effort required to process large orders.”
This is a common sentiment in the world of corporate gifting. Every part of online shopping has been optimized for a better customer experience, efficient in-house operations, and, ultimately, higher conversion. Omnichannel purchasing, one-click checkouts, personalized discounts, automatic tracking, dashboards abound — every part of ecommerce has been massively improved since it became mainstream.
Every part except for buying gifts, that is.
For a company that exclusively fields orders for corporate one-to-many gifts, Teak & Twine was making do with the tools available to their team: emails, spreadsheets, and a heckuva lot of resourcefulness.
Hart says, “Customers would reach out to us individually and ask if they could order 40 of a specific product and send it to 40 different addresses. Between coordinating the addresses, making sure the inventory was synced, getting the logo and card wording, plus sending a custom invoice…what sounded at the onset like an easy request would always turn into at least 20 emails back and forth with clients. We just knew this process could be automated!”
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A time-consuming process saps the fun for everyone.
While pulling together available tools is a great stop-gap measure for brands trying to bust into and test the growing corporate gifting market for their own brand, it’s a solution that has its pitfalls.
For example, manually entering addresses for gift recipients is an invitation for human error by clients or brands. Without automatic address validation, one slip of the finger could mean some unlucky recipient simply doesn’t get their gift. Clients get frustrated, recipients feel excluded, and brands scramble to find fool-proof solutions.
Conversations with clients and specific gift details are hard to track and reference in the future. And the entire process itself is difficult to harmonize across departments and teammates, especially if someone is just coming on as a seasonal Q4 hire.
Plus, once the gifts have been sent, that’s historically meant the end of engagement with the recipients. Low-tech (or no-tech) gifting solutions don’t offer gift recipients the chance to opt into a brand’s marketing and learn more about the products they were just gifted or the brand itself, which leaves an extremely hot acquisition opportunity left on the table. People who’ve just learned about your brand from a trusted source and are literally experiencing your products have to find their own way back to the store.
Teak & Twine is a company built on a bedrock of strong, authentic relationships and genuinely meaningful interactions. In order to maintain that mantra for clients and their recipients, Torrance knew a modern solution was needed to put an end to gifting pitfalls and build the best corporate gifting experience for her clients and her team.
The Solution: Automated Corporate Gift Processing Right on Their Site
Like most brands selling inherently giftable products, Q4 and its bounty of holidays is Teak & Twine’s busiest time of the year.
“We also see a strong demand throughout the year, especially around conferences, employee appreciation initiatives, and product launches. Other peaks include the end of fiscal quarters when businesses want to thank clients and partners,” mentions Torrance. “Our primary customers are businesses looking to create a meaningful gifting experience for their clients, employees, or event attendees.”
A consistent flow of orders with year-end surges, a variety of clients and order sizes, a slew of gifting occasions all a bit different yet requiring the same high level of care and attention — the nature of Teak & Twine’s business required a gifting tool that was flexible, nimble, efficient, and scalable.
Luckily for everyone, Zest fit the bill.
“We’ve focused heavily on improving the digital experience for our customers,” says Torrance. The team has been striving to make it easier to browse, customize, and place orders directly on the website, and the Zest gifting platform seamlessly aligned with those goals.
“Zest has been so helpful in making the experience better!” remembers Torrance, calling out specific features like:
- Logo uploader for branded assets
- Custom gift card messages
- Bulk orders without the hassle of emails and spreadsheets
As Hart told us, these features were a game-changer and soothed the all-too-common pain points of corporate gifting.
“Something we hear often is that gifting was often done in-house by someone in marketing, HR, or events, and it was a huge distraction! We’ve heard so many horror stories about giant assembly lines going on in office conference rooms and panicked runs to the post office. We’re here to take all that off of our clients’ plates,” states Hart. And with Zest automating the most time-consuming parts of the process for her team and her clients, Teak & Twine can clear off more plates than ever.
The Results: Smooth Sailing and Time Saved in First Holiday Season With Zest
The partnership between Zest and Teak & Twine kicked off in July 2024, giving Hart’s crew a couple of months to acclimate to life sans spreadsheets, put up a landing page, and share the news with shoppers before the holiday rush. By the time Q4 rolled around, the team was ready to run with newfound capabilities.
Most of Teak & Twine’s clients still worked closely with an account manager to ensure everything went smoothly and met expectations, but “Zest was the workhorse under the surface making sure everything went well and our clients had an incredible, easy experience,” recalls Hart.
The team leveraged their Zest-powered self-service storefront to meet growing demand and scale operations. In just a few clicks, clients could place large orders as swiftly as buying a single item. “This past holiday season, we had our most bulk purchases ever through Zest, and we received hardly any questions from customers.”
In fact, one client that had previously gifted with another company still relying purely on manual spreadsheets said that the “difference between last year versus this year with Zest was night and day.”
Zest is intentionally designed for gifters to feel confident in their (typically high-value) gift orders. The flow feels like shopping for yourself — products are neatly displayed, addresses are instantly validated, pricing is clear, and payment is easy (especially when you can send gifts to tons of people in just one transaction).
The only difference? Instead of buying one item, these customers may be purchasing hundreds of items, all with the same amount of transparency, trust, and ease. Where there had once been a lengthy 20-email back-and-forth thread between a client and a team member was now a fast, hassle-free experience.
“The scalability of our process makes it easy for companies to send hundreds (or even thousands) of gifts while still maintaining a personalized feel,” says Torrance.
The self-service storefront wasn’t the only gifting process that underwent some serious optimization, though.
For orders that required a human touch, the team at Teak & Twine was able to fully leverage Zest features like Private B2B Storefronts, which lets clients shop gifts that are customized or have special pricing from a gifting storefront accessible only by them, as well as Concierge and its all-in-one gift management tools and invoicing.
“We are excited to keep using Zest Concierge to manage large orders that go through our account managers. It makes the operational side of each order so much easier and clients love the order dashboard!” Torrance reflects.
With Zest on their website, Teak & Twine was able to efficiently place, manage, and process gift orders of any size, at any budget, for any client regardless of if they wanted to place a self-service order or get full white-glove treatment.
While Teak & Twine gifts have always left a lasting impression, the very task of ordering the gift may now be a pretty close second in how much joy it brings.
Teak & Twine Finds Alignment With Corporate Gifting That Puts People First
Thoughtful, intentional gifting is rarely synonymous with words like “fast” or “seamless.” Even when consumers find the perfect gift online, they have to clear hurdles like entering the right address for their recipient, figuring out a personalized gift message, and letting them know a surprise is on the way.
Multiply that process by hundreds of recipients and, well, it’s going to take a minute.
Torrance started Teak & Twine with a rock-solid understanding of how agonizing bulk gifting can feel for the people charged with the chore. She wanted to remove that stress from the gifting experience, and for the past 10 years, she’s been wildly successful in doing so.
Today, faced with growing demand, clientele variety, and beyond, she can continue to keep up her customer-centric mission with modern gifting tools made just for this moment.
With Zest, Torrance and her team are able to elevate the industry and achieve one very important goal: corporate gifting, but better.
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