Rye: Blog | The future of corporate gifting with Kris Rudeegraap, Co-founder and CEO @ Sendoso

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Table of Contents

How Sendoso started

On Sendoso’s impact on the corporate gifting space

How the remote work era has forced Sendoso to adapt

Leveraging AI for personalized gifting experiences

The significance of sustainability and ethical gifting

On what the future looks like for e-commerce and corporate gifting

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The future of corporate gifting with Kris Rudeegraap, Co-founder and CEO @ Sendoso

Rye

Mar 5, 2024

3 min read

Corporate gifting is undergoing a transformation, driven by innovative platforms like Sendoso that are leveraging data, AI, and automation to help businesses build stronger connections. We sat down with Chris Rudegraup, CEO and co-founder of Sendoso, to get his take on where the industry is headed. Kris Rudeegraap is the Co-founder and CEO of Sendoso, the largest corporate gifting platform in the world. They’ve raised more than $150 million to date. Hear from Kris as he shares his story on how he spotted the opportunity in corporate gifting many years ago, and his insights and predictions on how AI will impact the $240 billion corporate gifting market and eCommerce as a whole.

How Sendoso started

I started Sendoso 8 years ago. My hypothesis was that digital was getting noisy, so we needed to stand out more to drive results. Using gifting was a unique approach and something that I thought could do that. Since then, we’ve raised $155M in funding, we have over 50,000 users, 10 million plus sends on our platform, $100M plus spent on the platform, so we’ve seen some great volume.

On Sendoso’s impact on the corporate gifting space

In the early years, the “aha” was the time value saved of this operationally heavy sourcing, shipping, tracking, vendor management, reporting, et cetera. So that was one key selling point for us: Don't do all that, outsource it to us. And we operate a global network of warehouses, and we do all the supply chain and sourcing. So there’s a lot of value added behind the scenes… Now, we’re seeing more companies look at us compared with other channels and ask, “How does $1 spent on advertising compare with $1 spent on gifting?”

We also offer a very hands-on campaign services team that really allows for a company to say, “Hey, this is a program we want to run, go find stuff that we should do.” And so we'll go and procure really anything that is more customized and more one-off. And so with that, we'll do drop shipping. We also own and operate warehouses. We also have an overlay on Amazon too, where you can gift through Amazon, but hits our warehouse first where we unbox it and add a handwritten note, rebox it and then ship it out and track it through CRM. So it looks very personalized, as well.

How the remote work era has forced Sendoso to adapt

In the early days, we were sending [gifts] to people’s offices. It was easier to send group gifts, like 2,000 cupcakes to someone’s office. And then that quickly shifted to where we had to build features for address confirmation to have a secure way to grab your home address.

I think we're entering this era where there's this plethora of consumer data that's been around for decades… and is [becoming] more publicly available. Remote work has also led to home and work blending together even more, so it gives us a treasure trove of data to give a gift that you like and is exactly tailored to you.

Leveraging AI for personalized gifting experiences

We’ve sort of transformed into a data company over the last 8 years, and that data layer of the tens of millions of sends has really helped us perfect the AI engine behind the scenes. So for us, it boils down to: what's the right thing to send to the right person at the right time with the right message? Typically, for sales and marketing use cases, your goal is how do I drive a conversion? Or, how do I say thank you to encourage engagement? And AI plays a big role into what's that gift that is going to get someone to reply.

We now have this Smart Send [AI] feature where you can either put in someone's email address and it can get something specifically for them based on everything we know and social media and the web. We also have the ability to say, “I'm sending to somebody in IT in Boston, what should I send?” So you can give it more of a higher level persona. There's a variety of ways that you can use our recommendation engine, whether it's for the specific human, for the region, or globally.

The significance of sustainability and ethical gifting

Sendoso also includes a feature that allows you to filter through sustainable gift ideas, or women-owned businesses and other sourcing options. We have some really cool options where you can select from different types of packaging material. We have cardboard that has plant seeds in it. So when you plant the box, it will grow a flower.

We have spikes where companies will purposefully run like green-related programs. And they’ll want to buy a hundred thousand of this sustainable gift. In general, we're not seeing our entire customer set all go green. But again, the carbon offset initiatives and some of the other things will really help with what we do.

On what the future looks like for e-commerce and corporate gifting

I think AI is the obvious game changer, that’s a big takeaway. For merchants, I think there’s a lot of new ways you can get your products seen and in the hands of consumers… And I think supply chains are being disruptive and innovative in terms of how you build relationships with these merchants and vendors. There are different models where using different 3PLs get packages delivered faster, and supply chains that use AI are smarter at how they route packages and how they procure and source things.