Gift recipients convert 3x higher

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Naked Sunday was stuck: low velocity, buried in Amazon search, barely any reviews. They activated 252 micro-influencers through Stack Influence — creators who actually purchased the product on Amazon, tried it, and posted authentic UGC. No cash fees. Just product.

4 months later: 10× monthly sales, jumped 25,000 spots in Beauty & Personal Care rankings, 1.4M social impressions, and 57 organic product testimonials.

The model is simple — influencers buy your product with their own Amazon accounts, generating real purchase velocity that the algorithm rewards. You keep the UGC rights, the ranking boost, and the review momentum. Brands like Magic Spoon, Unilever, and MaryRuth Organics use it to hold page-1 positions.

Around 12% of orders across DTC brands are gifts.

Most brands have no idea who received them.

No name. No email. No follow-up. The package ships to someone who just had a brand experience — someone who opened a product, used it, and either loved it or didn't — and the brand gets nothing. No signal. No relationship. No second sale.

Nick Kennedy, co-founder of Giftnote, put the number on it: gift recipients convert at 3x the rate of a normal customer. Their AOV runs about 30% higher.

The default thinking is "well, they're not our customers." But that's exactly why this opportunity exists. Every other brand is thinking the same thing.

Gifting volume doubles in November and doubles again in December. If 12% of your orders are gifts year-round, that's a significant slice of traffic that currently disappears into a black hole.

The fix isn't complicated. It's a capture step most brands skip entirely.

What you need:

1. A gift recipient capture flow
When a customer checks out with a gift option, collect the recipient's email at the point of purchase. Not optional, not buried — part of the standard gift checkout. The buyer wants the recipient to get a good experience. Frame it that way.

2. A post-delivery sequence
3 emails, triggered after estimated delivery:

3. The GDPR note
Transactional messaging to gift recipients is GDPR-compliant as long as it's tied to the order they received. The welcome sequence above qualifies. Marketing emails after that require explicit opt-in — build that into the Day 14 email.

That's the full workflow. Three emails, one capture step, and you've turned a segment that previously disappeared into a warm audience that converts at 3x your baseline.

Action Summary:

Credit: Will Laurenson

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In this podcast episode, Maggie Gerth, founder of Props Luggage, shared how she turned a small, overlooked frustration into a scalable product.

The problem was simple: luggage sitting on dirty hotel floors because there’s never enough luggage racks.

Instead of accepting it, she built a suitcase with its own leg system.

But what made this interesting wasn’t just the product. It was what happened after launch.

Customers started using it in ways she didn’t expect. At airport gates as a desk. For meals. For work. The product expanded beyond its original use case through real-world behavior.

The bigger lesson came on the business side.

Maggie spent years perfecting the product, but realized too late that distribution requires just as much time, effort, and money.

Early traction came from doing everything: Google Ads, retail placements, trade shows, local media, and scrappy PR.

Now, for their next product, they’re using Kickstarter to access a built-in audience that actively looks for innovative products.

Actionable step:

🎧 Watch the full episode

YouTube | Spotify | Amazon

If you’re using the Shop app, you should be cautious – a new scam has emerged where fraudsters are impersonating legitimate businesses.

These fraudsters create stores on the app that look identical to real stores, using the same name, contact information, and product lineup. This makes it nearly impossible for customers to distinguish between the real store and the fake one.

One shopper found this out the hard way when they bought from a fake store, then called the real store to find out they’d been impersonated.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much the real business could do about it.

Even worse, it appears that the Shop app isn’t removing these fraudulent stores, despite being reported by both customers and businesses.

If you're shopping on the Shop app, it’s a good idea to double-check store details and reach out to the business directly if something feels off.

Source: Reddit

The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

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