San Francisco-based startup Sincerely started out sending physical postcards to friends and family from your phone's photos. Instead of picking up a tourist-shop postcard during your trip to London, you could snap a picture next to Big Ben with your phone and with one tap have the company send a card to your mail-loving parents.
Just in time for swamped holiday shoppers, Sincerely is taking that idea and applying it to gift giving with the launch of Sesame. The iOS app (an Android version is in the works) lets you choose from 13 curated gift sets, each designed to give your friend, mom, or co-worker a unique experience.
Sincerely CEO Matt Brezina believes people love to receive and give experiences, not stuff. "But if you give someone ballroom dancing lessons or a helicopter ride, you're asking them to do work by making the reservations and coordinating the whole thing," he says. Instead, Sesame's experiences are easy enough for anyone to use any day of the week, and the boxes give you all the items you need.
The boxes all have a theme, like "Baby Playdate," "Ultimate Unwind," and "Snow Day," and includes items that fit the theme. Brezina sent Wired the "Afternoon Tea" box (above), which comes with a tea-steeping mug, three tins of specialty teas, and a picture frame, so you can, as Brezina puts it, reflect on someone you love during a tea break (at Wired we installed a picture of Linus Torvalds in the frame). The Ultimate Unwind box includes bath salts, a scented soy candle, and chocolate truffles – everything you'd need for a relaxing bath.
Each box is curated by someone familiar with the experience. For example, Baby Playdate (right) was put together by moms at baby subscription site Citrus Lane and comes with toddler-appropriate toys. Sincerely's community, made up of people who have used it's other apps Postagram and Ink, can suggest new gift ideas and the best ones will become Sesame boxes. The company is also putting together specialty boxes for Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, and other hard-to-shop-for holidays in 2013.
The goodies in the box are only half of the gift, says Brezina. The other half is the experience of opening his handsomely-wrapped boxes. "Ninety percent of the value of receiving a gift is with the opening and unwrapping," he says. After looking at the lack-luster way retail giant Amazon ships gifts to people – in a brown box with a packing peanuts and a return slip – Brezina decided that Sesame boxes needed to include a remarkable unboxing experience. That experience includes a bright blue box with handles on the side that read "open." Once you flip one edge of the box open, the handles reveal the word "sesame," and you're greeted with a card written by the gift giver. Pull back the white tissue paper, and you find every item in the box has a tag that describes what to do with it.
In the Afternoon Tea box, the cup's tag says "fill me" and a "steep me" tag is attached to the tea. "That takes a lot of work," says Brezina, "but it's worth it because it extends the unwrapping experience way beyond what you would get with Amazon."
Boxes cost either $29 or $49, depending on the number of items. Brezina assures you'd be proud to send any box to either your old-fashioned grandparents or hipster friends.
Sincerely has been mobile focused from the start, and with Sesame it's betting that people are willing to buy something bigger than a postcard from their iPhone. With the explosion of mobile shopping the two-year old company might have timed it perfectly. It seems every company, whether it's a startup or massive retailer, has an app to help to check the best prices in the store or buy a gift on your bus ride home.
So far this year, 16.3 percent of online shopping has taken place on a mobile device says Mike Santoro, president of Chicago-based Walker Sands marketing agency. "The data shows that mobile shopping is up from last year, and people are buying things while watching TV or on-the-go," says Santoro. Likewise, there was huge boost in online and mobile shopping over the Thanksgiving shopping weekend, and we can expect the same for shoppers in December.
For Brezina, going mobile was a matter of convenience. He had the idea for Sincerely after rushing around to find and send his grandmother a card in time for her birthday. With Sesame, he's just extending that idea. "Previously, I'd be walking down Market Street in San Francisco, between Third and Fourth, I'd remember it was my grandma's birthday, and I'd have to write down a reminder to send her a gift," he says. "Now, by the time I reach Fourth Street, I have browsed three Sesame gifts and already sent her one." All you iPhone-toting last-minute holiday shoppers, your app has arrived.
