Why Gifting Is the Biggest Opportunity for Ecommerce Brands in 2025 — Liz Lorge | Why Gifting is a $300B+ Market, What Brands Need To Know About Gifting, Why Gen Z and Millennials Love Direct Brand Gifting, How Corporate Gifting Drives New Revenue (#363)

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In this episode of the Ecommerce Coffee Break, host Claus Lauter welcomes Liz Lorge, marketing lead at Zest.co, to discuss why online gifting represents the biggest opportunity for ecommerce brands in 2025. 

They talk about how the pandemic transformed ecommerce trends and millennial shopping behaviors, and why modern consumers expect seamless gifting experiences. 

Discover how digital marketing and gift platforms can help brands tap into this trillion-dollar market with the right tools and strategy. 

Topics discussed in this episode: 

• Why gifting is a trillion-dollar market with corporate gifting at $300B+ 
• How the pandemic created an 80% surge in online gifting demand 
• What modern gifting platforms offer vs traditional marketplace solutions 
• How brands now process hundreds of gift orders in minutes not weeks 
• Why Millennials and Gen Z prefer direct brand gifting experiences 
• What successful gifting brands reveal about scaling gift operations 
• How event and corporate gifting create new revenue streams 
• Why manual gifting processes limit growth opportunities 
• What makes specialty food brands excel in gifting 
• How brands can cut gift processing from weeks to days 
  
  

Links & Resources 

Website: https://www.zest.co/ 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liz-lorge-b7342431/ 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/zest-co 

Get access to more free resources by visiting the show notes at
https://tinyurl.com/bdx9zjyx 

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Transcript

Hey there, welcome to the eCommerce Coffee Break Podcast. I'm your host, Claus Lauter, bringing you actionable tips and strategies to help you grow your online store and sell smarter. In today's episode we find out why gifting is the biggest opportunity for e commerce brands in 2025. Joining me on the show today is Liz Lorge, Marketing Lead at Zest.

co. So let's dive right into it. Hello and welcome to another episode of the e commerce coffee break. Podcast. Today, we want to find out why gifting is the biggest opportunity for e commerce brands in 2025. Now, gifting has changed a lot specifically since the pandemic, and it has become a very good option for online sellers.

And we want to talk a little bit about the changes that online gifting has undergone, why modern consumers expect it. Tomorrow we will see how e commerce stores can update their own gifting experience to leverage the surging sales channel. With me on the show today I have Liz Lorge. She is the marketing lead at Zest.

co where she champions the growing world of online gifting and e commerce. With experience at companies like Leakpages, Drip, and Root, Liz had spent nearly three years driving test marketing. So let's welcome her to the show. Hi, Liz. How are you today? 

Hi, I'm good. How are you doing? 

I'm very well. Great to have you on the show.

Liz, we want to talk about gifting, and I'm really looking forward to that because that's a topic we never had on the show, and I think there is a lot of potential for sellers out there. Now, to get into the right place, tell me a little about, about. gifting in general and how it has evolved specifically since the pandemic?

For sure. Yeah. I'm not surprised. It's a topic you haven't had a lot of opportunity to talk about on your show yet because it is relatively new in terms of e commerce. I mean, gifting as a whole is not, not new at all, but in terms of the tools available to e commerce brands, it's entirely new for e commerce brands.

Um, and yeah, to talk about gifting, uh, Some of the numbers where we are at with gifting right now is in the U S alone. Um, gifting as a whole is over a trillion dollar market and corporate gifting alone is a significant chunk of that 300 billion plus. And that's one of the fastest, fastest growing markets, um, in, in e commerce these days.

And a lot of times when you think about. Let's focus on, um, you think about companies that are giving employees like branded, branded swag or hats or pens or like lanyards, kind of, kind of generic things like that. But in 2020, the pandemic started, um, and people started working remotely. Families were apart, friends were apart, employees were apart, and gifting had always sort of been.

a part of corporate, corporate America showing appreciation to employees. But 2020, because of this distance, it really got amped up, um, Google searches for, uh, online gifts in, in the start of 2020 shot up 80%. And it really led to this. insight that, uh, brands can capitalize on this. Brands can leverage this.

Like people want to send more gifts outside of the holidays. They're doing more year round gifting and they want to send more thoughtful gifts. They want to go beyond. A branded sweatshirt, for instance, because you can only have so many branded items before you're like, okay, this is, this is enough. Um, but the struggle with that is the people who are sending these gifts or buying these gifts in bulk.

Don't one have a lot of great options. Um, cause a lot of e commerce stores aren't set up to provide that experience where it's really easy for someone to. come in and buy a bunch of gifts and send them to a bunch of addresses to a bunch of now newly remote employees or friends who are now far away that they can't get with or family members they can't get with.

Um, and so Zest, Zest had started life as a pretty, pretty simplified Shopify specific app, where if you were going on someone's website, you could pick out a product, To send to a friend or a family member, whoever, and you could add, you could click send as a gift and add like a gift, a gift message, which is great, super thoughtful.

Um, but then what we were hearing more and more from the brands that we were working with was actually this pain point is they have all these people who want to send their products as. Gifts to all these people who are now disparate spread all over the place and they didn't have an easy way to do that So that's sort of organically like we were in the gifting space.

We started there and then we sort of organically grew to First help brands with their corporate gifting channels and help them manage this influx of customers wanting all these gifts that they had no easy tools to process these gifts with. Um, and now we've also spread into consumer gifting. So we're really the, the first of its kind, like online gifting platform for e commerce brands, all e commerce brands, not just Shopify anymore, but any, any e commerce platform we work with.

Okay. You mentioned that it is very difficult or was very difficult in the past to have the right features on your website to make this whole gifting experience easy. What are the kind of top three features an e commerce store needs to have to make is frictionless to make it easy? 

For sure. So, uh, sort of our bread and butter original feature, once, once we expanded from that very first iteration of just the Shopify app, we've, uh, like I said, now we are a, we're a white label.

platform. So we integrate directly with, uh, an online stores brand. We are a part of your website. We're an extension of your experience. We have your brand colors, and we obviously feature, like, your branded products. Um, and like I mentioned before, like, gifting isn't like a brand new idea in the space of e commerce.

There are gifting marketplaces out there, which are great. And they have their time and their place in their audience. And they're really heavily utilized by like sales teams or marketing teams that are sending a lot of like account based marketing campaigns. And those are really great. Those have a streamlined process for a salesperson, for instance, to get in there and buy a bunch of gifts for, um, potential clients or cold outreach or things like that.

But for the average person who's sending these gifts, those platforms are pretty cost prohibitive and they have to go to this platform. They have a bunch of products to pick from from a bunch of different brands. And so what really sets us apart is that we are. built for a brand to use. Like I said, a white label platform, we, we look and feel like your brand.

Um, you get to retain more of your margin and it's this self service mode where people can come in and shop all of your most giftable products. And they can pick out one or more of them. They can, uh, add personalized gift notes. They can upload their customized, um, digital, like, note cards. They can pick out handwritten notes.

They can add on, like, different options that your brand might specifically offer, like custom gift wrap or custom, uh, logo printed note cards or something like that. And then people also have the option to Send these gifts, um, via classic OG snail mail. Um, and they can quickly upload like a ton of addresses in a couple of seconds, or they can send these gifts via a text, via a link or an email.

So they don't even need to know people's addresses because the recipients will fill that information in. And so one of the biggest things with that is historically you think about gifting. And if I wanted to send. A bulk gift order or a multi ship order as we call it. Cause it's being shipped to multiple recipients.

Um, I would need to first fill out a contact form probably in the footer of someone's website. Have this really lengthy back and forth communication with them, getting the addresses, right. Um, it's, I don't have transparency as the consumer, like what products do you all offer? How can I customize this?

Like it just takes a lot of, a lot of back and forth on my part. Right. So compare that with like your regular DTC consumer experience, where I go to a website and everything is as streamlined and optimized as possible for me to just shop for myself. But if I want to send gifts to people, it's a, It's an arduous, time consuming task.

Um, so we solve that for the shopper and our tools solve that for the brands on their end. Um, that's our self service model of Zest. And we also just recently launched a concierge service, which helps brands meet their needs. all of their gifters with the experience that they want to be met with when it comes to sending gifts to one person or tons of people.

I want to dive a little bit exactly in this topic, one person or tons of people. So obviously gifting, you mentioned corporate gifting, but there's also other spaces in the market that where gifting is a very, very good fit. So that might be a once off, but that might be also ongoing. Give me a couple of examples, how your clients use the experience in their business.

For sure. Um, we have, we, one of our clients is, uh, Levenne Bakery. Um, and they use Zest for their corporate gifting. They also have, uh, CTAs on some of their product pages for their average consumer to come in and be like, Oh, I would like to send a bunch of cookies to my friends for sure. But they're also unique in that they also use us for their event gifting.

So they're a super popular bakery a lot of people use them for party favors wedding favors things like that and They leverage zest for their customers who are interested in doing that so a customer can come in Go to their event gifting page, fill out exactly, exactly the items they want. They want a hundred chocolate chip cookies.

They want a hundred fudge cookies. They want them wrapped in blue ribbon or gold ribbon or black ribbon. And then they can fill out a note. They want to attach to every little party favor. And they can enter the address that they want all those items shipped to on a specific date. So they can schedule that ahead of time as well as, you know, like wedding planning, for instance, you want to get that stuff squared away six months in advance.

So you can schedule that way ahead of time. And, uh, on Levin Bakery's end, all of that is automatically processed. Whereas that would have been a conversation between Between the gifter and the brand, that could have been a conversation that lasted. Two, three, four weeks. It's now something that takes a day to process for them.

Uh, because the consumer has all of that transparency, all of that control on their end to order these gifts and Lovenges gets that order. Like it's a regular, like it's just a regular order for them with all the customized details, the address they need, the gift notes, all of that stuff automatically processed for them.

And it goes right into their e commerce back end. And what they're able to do with that then is do more weddings, they're able to do more big events because they're not spending two, three, four weeks per event trying to process these orders, they can do it in a day and do more of them at scale. 

Talk me through the process of how one comes to test and does the setup.

Probably you mentioned has a backend, has a Shopify store or any other platform. And then how do you start to promoting your service? 

We're one of the only platforms doing this built specifically for e commerce brands to handle their multi ship or bulk gifting or corporate gifting channels and really help them scale.

Um, so a lot of times if people go to Google and search, Multi ship gifting or bulk gifting tool or bulk gifting. We're one of the only platforms that shows up. Um, so, uh, I will say like our biggest competition has been just spreadsheets and docs that brands have tried to like piece together themselves.

So we don't have like a solid other platform that we're really competing with at the moment. So people will either come to Zest. Just through their Google search. They have a need for this product and we are the ones that can fill it right now. Or they see us on other websites. They might be sending a gift themselves and they'll go to like Milk Bar or one of our other, Grazer, Brightland, one of our other, like very popular, like gifting partners, and they'll be like, Hey, this is a really cool experience.

It took me no time at all to send. 200 gifts to people. How do I get this on my website? So we also get a lot of, a lot of inbound like that. And then getting started with Zest is. It's, it's pretty dynamic. We don't have a one size fits all sort of onboarding flow, uh, because every, every brand is different.

Um, it depends like the products they're selling as gifts, the audience they're talking to, whether they want us mostly for their self service multi ship gifting, like I was just talking about, or maybe they want to use us for their more like. High touch VIP concierge gifting, or maybe they want to use this for event gifting.

So we really work closely with them to figure out what, what is best for them. Prioritize that, um, our team is super hands on we're, we're a startup, we're pretty lean, um, and we're all hands on deck. Every brand gets a customer success person. Um, me and marketing, we'll try to help with. How can they message this to their customers?

Cause this is also going to be a newer experience for their customers. So how can they best communicate this great new gifting experience, um, to their customers and we're just, we're on call for all of our partners, uh, whenever they need, especially right now in the thick of like Q4 gifting season. We're, we're on call when people.

Want to say, Hey, how can I get these gifts to these people? How can I do this? How can you do that? We're fully on deck with, um, getting people set up so they have success. 

I want to dive a little bit into demographics. Are there any specific key demographics that you serve more than others? Obviously, in the pandemic, there were, everyone was online.

This has shifted a little bit. But can you see demographics, certain age groups, other demographics that stick out a little bit more than others and accepting gifting? 

I will say the younger demographic demographics, so millennials, and even Gen Z, even though you might think Gen Z is pretty young right now, the the top end of Gen Z.

They're the ones who are really devoted to having these year round moments of connection with people. Um, and they're going to be the ones who are, who are at companies buying the gifts for all the employees. They're going to be the ones who are buying the party favors. Like Millennials and Gen Z in particular are shopping online more.

They're spending more per person on gifts than any other generation at the same age. And they prefer shopping directly with brands versus going to a marketplace. So the fact that we can live on a brand's website and provide this really seamless, streamlined gifting experience that is very intuitive and very much like they're just shopping for themselves, it makes sense to them.

They just, they come in and they get it. We have our brand partners tell us again and again. I barely had to do instruction around this new experience because it just clicks for these. The people who are buying the gifts right now, um, they come in, they pick out their products, enter an address or hundreds of addresses, and it's all in one checkout instead of going through the checkout a ton of time.

So it's very intuitive to them. And I will say they're also more intentional with their gifting. They really want to give something that's thoughtful. They want to give something that's memorable and they really want to support brands that have. a mission or a vision or values that align with their own.

So they're less, less likely to settle for an Amazon gift card. For instance, they know that that's going to be less memorable. It's going to be less exciting. You might forget to use it if you're the recipient and it's just going to be less impactful than if they got you something really thoughtful from.

from a brand that was making something really valuable for them. 

I want to talk about a little bit this emotional side of things. Does it increase customer loyalty? Your brand awareness? What are the benefits of using gifting as a tool? 

Yeah, for sure. We have a lot of brands. Brightland Olive Oil is one of them that comes to mind.

They are Uh, sort of organically came into gifting. They didn't set out to be like a go to gifting brand. And in the 2022 holiday season, they had an influx of people who said, Hey, this is a, this is a high quality product. It looks really cool. The vibes are good. I want to send this to 400 of my employees.

I want to send this to all my family members. I want to send this to all my friends and they weren't equipped. To handle that. What that took for them was basically round the clock, feel it manually processing these large orders, trying to collect all the addresses, trying to validate the addresses, trying to manage like shipping notifications after the fact, handwriting notes.

Like it just was, it was a lot of work for them and they made it through the 2022 holiday season. And at the end of it, they were like. This was awesome. We love that our customers want us as a gift, but we can't do this again, unless we have the right tools. So, uh, they came to zest. We were able to set them up with their own, like gifting storefronts, um, right before the 2023 holiday season.

And they remarked on how customers were coming in again, with like very little instruction. A lot of people were just organically finding this on their gifting page on their website. And what they were seeing is a lot of people would buy maybe a couple olive oil kits, things like that. And they would come back again and place a hundred order or a hundred order.

Because they were like, this was such a seamless experience for me as the consumer that I'm coming back again, because I can't get this experience at another company. Um, so once these customers come in, they realize how easy it is for them to place this order. All of the like phone calls, contact forms, stuff like that is cut out for them and they can just.

Buy all the gifts they need, easily send them all over the country. No problems just in minutes. So they come back for that experience again and again. And Brightland just in that season alone was able to increase their corporate gifting side by over 50 percent just in that one holiday season. And I mean, we're still in the thick, like still in the thick of holiday gifting right now, but I will say they are doing quite well this season.

This year as well. So there that growth is continued to go. Cause people are coming back for year round gifting. They're coming back again for more holiday gifting, because you have that, that perfect mashup of an excellent product, super giftable product. People love it. And an experience that makes it so easy to buy and get into the hands of people.

That's gold. 

A lot of merchants out there, online sellers have not even looked in the auction of offering or having a part of the business open for gifting experience. What kind of recommendation would you give for someone, a brand looking into this and, um, what would be this first step? They should do getting into gifting 

for sure.

Um, I just, I just told the story of Breitland where gifting was sort of like organically, their customers just did it for them, made them realize that this was a great gift. But there are also a lot of brands out there who know they're making something that's an awesome gift. Um, but they're really stuck in the trenches of.

It's such a time consuming process if they wanted to scale that channel. Um, that's why a lot of times you'll see if corporate gifting, for instance, is, uh, just a little, a little link in the footer of a website, because A lot of brands aren't set up to handle a ton of people coming in and placing all of these custom orders or like high, uh, quantity orders.

Um, and so a lot of brands will either, maybe they'll offer like a gift card to suffice like, Oh, you want to order 200 gift cards. We can do that easily. Uh, and then unfortunately, a lot of brands won't offer gifting really at all. Um, because it is, it's so time consuming for them to, to do these things, to process each order manually, to have these three, four week long conversations with people, um, just to get an order ready to go.

And so I would say if you are running a brand right now and you're already feeling that pull of people who want to send Your, your products as gifts. You have emails that are sitting there like, Hey, how do I send this to 50 people right now? I really love what you're doing. I want to do that. If you're already feeling that pull, um, looking into a platform like zest would be awesome, um, to really help you scale that because it's a huge time saver, not just for your customers, but everything is automatically processed on your end, just like a regular order.

And it saves, it saves the brands, uh, hours and hours of time. Milk Bar is an example where last holiday season, their standard processing time for any gift order was two weeks. And that was almost immediately cut down to two days. Um, and so again, they're really able to scale that channel. Uh, and brands that also are doing gifting right now, But do feel that pain of like, we're stuck, we're stuck in the weeds.

We're stuck in these spreadsheets. We're stuck in these own processes that we've created and they take so much time, but you know, there's like a bigger piece of the pie out there. You know, there's this bigger opportunity to scale this channel. Uh, zest is definitely a platform that could help brands.

Just rip open the floodgates and let let that channel scale is as big as they want it to 

Talk before that your platform and I had to look at it has a ton of features Walk me through the typical onboarding process for a new user. What steps are involved? How long does it take 

for sure? Typically a new user a new user will come on and say They'll reach out through a contact form or reach out to us on LinkedIn.

We get some of those. Um, and that's when we'll start a conversation. Uh, people interested in Zest will speak directly with, uh, one of our founders, our co founder, um, the CEO of the company, Alex, they'll talk directly with him for 20, 30 minutes to see if like, this is a really good fit, understand like their pain points, like where they are feeling that pull and where they feel like they really need help.

And. We move on from there. We have a customer success person dedicated to making sure that person gets. Set up they need our eng team is, um, we'll do a lot of custom customizations for brands based on like the e commerce platform they're running on. Um, so that also varies on whether you're on Shopify something.

And we, the turnaround time, once the decision is made, once a brand is, um, Signed on and they're like, yes, we need this now The time to turn on zest on a website could be a matter of days We work really hard. We are extremely hands on with our brands to make sure that they have success and we've already had Brands reach out already at the start of December, this December.

And they're saying, Hey, we need this for the holidays. We need it like right now. And we've already got them set up and launched in time for hopefully to catch a few of those, uh, few of those holiday gift orders. So it really depends on the brand's timeline and how we can work with them on that. But we are extremely hands on to get.

Brands what they need to get set up and get gifting as soon as possible. 

Okay. Uh, December getting ready for December might be a bit short. 

Anyway, 

um, who's your perfect customer? Are there specific industries on niche that you see that are taking this up more than others? 

Yeah, absolutely. Um, we've had an incredible amount of pull, probably a surprise to nobody, from specialty food brands.

So, high quality olive oils, cookies, cakes, um, savory foods, pies, things like that, like, obviously, universally loved, um, delicious food. And, uh, We went to the fancy food show last year to also get in front of a bunch of these specialty food brands. Um, and they're seeing a ton of success. Wine is another one, but we also see success with, um, like sort of lifestyle brands or health healthcare brands.

We have like a meditation company, different coffee companies. But again, we see the most success with brands that are. Already feeling that pull of gifting from their customers and they need a way to meet that demand and like meet that new behavior. Um, a lot of times these brands are doing at least 300k in revenue and that's because like if a brand doesn't have any, any customers, the odds of getting customers who also want to send a bunch of gifts like right off the bat, like they might not see a ton of success right away.

So we just want to make sure brands are. are a little bit established, finding the success, but we also really want to be accessible to a ton of brands. So definitely specialty foods, uh, brands that are feeling this pull and, and really any brand that is like, is very confident. in the potential of this channel, the opportunity that gifting presents to them.

And they're ready to make that commitment to doing their all for this channel. They're like, I know my customers want to send these products as gifts. I want to set up this channel and I want to test it right away because I have a hunch. This is it. Let's go. 

Yeah. I think gifting is definitely a channel that a lot of brands.

Online sellers should look into, I think it's underserved. And I think your platform is a perfect example on how you can make it easier and create a win win situation for the seller, creating more revenue, better service, and for the customer, make it easier for them to send out gifts before our coffee break comes to an end today.

Is there anything that you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet? 

I think exactly what you just said. It's, it's entirely an underserved market. It's a, the gifting experience as a whole has been left behind. Every other part of, uh, an e commerce store has typically been optimized to the brink from the ads to get people in to the on page shopping experience, to the post purchase experience and tracking emails and All of that marketing that happens afterward and gifting has sort of been sequestered to the stone age for a while.

Like, uh, most of the time a brand's gifting experience on their website will look almost exactly like it did 20 years ago, where people have, like, they have a one size fits all situation where people have to come in, fill out a form, have the back and forth, the processing time. And it's just. Jarring how different it is from the typical e commerce experience today, if I were just shopping for myself.

So, uh, if brands have these great giftable products and they know that customers would love to send these items, whether as just a regular consumer to family and friends, or really take advantage of that growing 300 billion plus corporate gifting market, a tool like this is really going to be the be the solution you need to.

Get into that industry, lead your category and scale this channel for the long run. 

Yeah, I think D2C marketers need to broaden their mind a little bit and look into B2B in corporate gifting market, because as you said, there is a ton of revenue to make. And with a platform like yours, it's so easy. Where can people go and find out more about you guys?

They can go right to our website, www. zest. co and they can See all we have to offer there. They can see all the different features we have. Um, there are a lot because we are really, first of its kind of comprehensive. Gifting platform built for these e commerce brands. And then they can get in touch with us through our contact page.

Fill out that form. It goes directly to me, to the founders. Um, real people are reading these in real time and we get back to people within. minutes to make sure that we can get started and see what's possible. 

Cool. I will put links in the show notes as always, then you're just one click away. I hope a lot of people will try it out because I think it's really a big opportunity out there for a lot of merchants would have products that might be a great gift and it just open a new flow of revenue coming into the business.

So let's see how that goes. And I hope a lot of people will check it out. Thanks so much for your time today. 

Thank you.