There’s a lot of noise on the internet when it comes to helping e-commerce brands scale. TikTok shopping, social ads, influencer marketing — all of these are channels brands use to stand out, reach more customers and grow. But there’s one channel many brands are missing out on.
Corporate gifting.
It’s an industry expected to hit $306 billion by the end of 2024, making it an enormous (but surprisingly overlooked) growth opportunity for e-commerce brands with gift-worthy products. Even the brands that offer corporate gifting services find it difficult to do well and at scale. That’s because the corporate gifting process is a relic of the past; it’s highly manual for brands and full of friction for corporate gifters.
With Zest, those days are now over.
Contact Forms and Spreadsheets Don’t Cut It
We’ve watched as our partners, ranging from up-and-coming coffee companies to household-name bakeries, tried to capitalize on this growing industry but struggled to do so. Painfully manual processes — think contact forms, spreadsheets, sales calls, endless back-and-forth emails and logistical nightmares — were severely limiting how big the channel could be for them.
The outdated experience was also taking a toll on their customers. Corporate gifters want to send cool products from the brands they know and love. And they want the same easy, delightful checkout experience when sending gifts en masse that they’re accustomed to when placing their personal e-commerce orders. But, more often than not, they’re met with contact forms and friction that send them fleeing.
The truth is, there simply hasn't been an e-commerce platform built from the ground up that’s optimized for corporate gifting, and it's a pain both brands and customers have dealt with for too long.
Corporate gifting marketplaces solve some of this friction. But while these marketplaces are a handy bridge between brands and gifters, joining one means sacrificing a brand’s experience, product margin and ownership of their customer relationship, aka a lot of pieces critical to a brand’s long-term growth.
There’s a better way — one where corporate gifters place orders with ease on a brand’s website, and brands automate the tedious manual tasks of processing those orders.
Zest: the First White-Labeled Corporate Gifting Platform for E-commerce Brands
We’ve been all in on empowering brands to fully realize the opportunities this growth channel has in store, and now, we’re thrilled to share that we’re the first and only white-labeled corporate gifting platform in the market.
A lot like Shopify, Zest works in the background to enable e-commerce brands to offer their own direct multi-ship and corporate gifting experiences to their own customers, on their own websites with their own branding.
Zest reduces the friction and time-consuming back-and-forth of placing and tracking one-to-many gift orders. Placing a corporate order to one or tons of people is now just as optimized and customer-centric as your typical DTC shopping experience, with baked-in features like:
- easy-to-shop storefronts dedicated to corporate gifts
- a fast multi-ship bulk address uploader
- flexible gift-delivery options like shipping directly to an address or e-gifting with a link, text or email
- the power to schedule gift deliveries ahead of time
One of the best parts of Zest is that it helps brands truly meet customers where they are, whether they want full self-service or prefer concierge support:
- Zest-powered public storefronts align with the majority of today’s gifters who are seeking a self-service experience and want full insight into product availability, pricing, send method, shipping notifications and more.
- Zest’s private gifting storefronts let brands build one-of-a-kind gift shops for individual clients with unique asks or special pricing.
- Zest’s automated order processing and intuitive tech mean corporate gifting teams have more time to dedicate to clients who want more of a concierge experience.
Our white-label evolution meant taking all of those features and wrapping them up with our partners’ branding. We put the Zest brand in the background and are giving our partners the keys to:
- host Zest on their own domain
- send their own gifting transactional emails via integrations with tools like Klaviyo
- offer customer accounts in a branded portal where gifters can check receipts, shipping statuses and more
Instead of compromising a shred of their brand identity, our partners finally have an unprecedented level of control over the big (the customer experience), the small (transactional emails) and everything in between (nurturing every corporate customer relationship).
Zest turns the once-disparate, friction-filled corporate gifting hassle into a fast, enjoyable and memorable shopping experience. Just like it should be.
We’re Meeting a Need for Brands and Consumers in a Big Way
We’ve partnered with brands including Milk Bar, Levain Bakery, Brightland, Grove Cookie Company, Vosges Haut-Chocolat and Graza to power their corporate gifting channels, and the results over the last year speak for themselves.
We enabled Milk Bar to reduce gift processing time from two weeks to two days. We helped Brightland increase corporate gift revenue by 50%. Zest-powered corporate gifting storefronts accounted for 20% of Grove’s total revenue in the first 11 months after the cookie company rolled it out. The list goes on.
Finally, brands have the tools they need to give their corporate gifting customers the exact experience they want without having to compromise their customer experience or product margin. In a short amount of time, these brands have been able to attract and convert more gifters than ever, understand and nurture these customer relationships, and scale this channel without piling more manual tasks onto their plates.
Simply put, Zest is the key they’ve been waiting for to unlock corporate gifting as a lucrative new channel.
If you’re interested in adding your name to the list of brands growing with better gifting, we’d love to chat. Join us on the Zest journey and become a corporate gifting dynamo.
