Giftly · 2024
A gift card for "any bakery"
Built multi-place gifts: one card composed from several real businesses, for senders who know the person but not the place.
PublicThe situation
A gift card names one business, which quietly demands that the sender know the recipient's exact spot. Plenty of senders know the person instead — she loves pastries, she lives in Portland — and the product had no way to say that.
The constraints
- The composed card still has to read as a gift, not a search result. Whichever place is named first is the part the recipient actually reads.
- The places are real listings with ratings, scoped to a city — not free-text wishes — so search quality is part of the gift.
The call
Compose several businesses into one card instead of forcing a choice. The preview builds the card as the selection grows — "Any Bakery and 5 other places" — and the order is editable, because the first-named place carries the message.
Add category chips — "Any bakery" — to stand in when the sender does not know the exact spot. The chip admits what the sender actually knows, instead of making them guess a storefront.
What happened
Multi-place gifts shipped with their own customizer step and product pages.
Two years later the recommendation engine made composed cards its default suggestion — a card built from what the system knows about a recipient fits better than a single guessed storefront.