It's the season of gifting; of sharing and caring. And that's why Manoj Agarwal, is all set to help you give your share of infinite x's and o's to those scouting for that coveted gift with giftxoxo.com, a unique experiential gifting site.
After running Tawa, a restaurant in the city, he mentored at Entrancecorner.com and has worked with the likes of Yahoo, Manipal Education, and Flipkart.
Being from a business family, Manoj grew up in an entrepreneurial environment and during his Flipkart stint he found that gifting was one of the key reasons why people shopped online. “Concepts such as experience gifting, gift recommendations, and group gifting which are quite popular in a lot of countries is unheard in India, which the other co-founder Sumit Khandelwal and I identified as a wide space. Experience gifting is a novel concept and people are very keen to explore something beyond the regular product gifting as it gives a whole new dimension to gifting. The feedback has been awesome our and there have been multiple repeat purchases."
Manoj adds, “The idea of flying a microlight plane or cooking your own dish at a five star is dream come true for people through our experiential gifts. We are building strong technology platforms for corporate gifting. Technology has hardly been used in the traditional gifting market so far. We are building solutions around loyalty programmes, rewards and recognition, ROI reports, tracking and MIS. Apart from that we are also building some robust gifting solutions, which will help customers choose the right gift based on various traits and occasions. There's a lot of innovation happening everyday in terms of gifting, just in time for the gifting season."
We ask the engineering graduate who has an MBA degree from IIM Kozhikode, on why he shunned his white collar job to start a restaurant and he explains, “When I joined Yahoo, I found that getting good north Indian food in Bengaluru was a challenge and that led to starting a restaurant. Although it was a tremendous success, I sold it after two years, as I wanted to do an MBA. I worked with Flipkart before starting Giftxoxo as the Internet space has been my forte. I was one of the initial employees of Flipkart when they had just started marketing openly."
