Why did we Back “Swageazy”?
(B2B SaaS platform for corporate gifting and employee benefits)
Founded Year: 2021
Website: https://swageazy.com/
Founders: Sameer Wahie and Sneh Setu
Raised: $941k
Backers: Huddle, InfoEdge, Anicut Capital, Angel List
The Vision behind Swageazy:
To create India’s first all-in-one E-commerce and SaaS platform that provides automated gifting services to enterprises for their employees, customers, and other stakeholders alongside a curated marketplace for relevant company merchandise (commonly known as swag).
What makes Swageazy unique:
Swageazy is entering a market segment (corporate gifting) that continues to be an under-penetrated & highly localized space. This presents an untapped market opportunity for enterprise gifting for employees & customers, in form factors that are permissible by the corporates.
Swageazy is an early mover solving for a large market by providing an all-in-one SaaS platform that automates gifting for customers & employees —
Sending gifts is now as easy as sending a push notification
Curated Catalogs filtered according to budget, use case, location, etc
Automate physical sends by creating campaigns based on milestones
Measure net corporate spend & ROI on gifting campaigns
The problem at hand
$6 billion+ is spent on corporate gifting, company swag, and branded merchandise without any scalable and efficient way to manage this spending and calculate ROI. While the pandemic accelerated the rise of remote work culture, even in a pre-pandemic time period, corporate gifting is a routine cost of doing business. It’s used to recognize employees and strengthen relationships with clients or partners. At the outset, corporate gifting is the practice by which businesses give presents to clients, partners, and employees in order to motivate certain behaviors and increase brand awareness. But it took on new urgency as a result of the pandemic.
With company staff dispersed, a well-chosen gift became a way to keep employees connected and reward them for work performed above and beyond under extremely difficult circumstances. When corporate events went digital, a gift box for valued attendees brought a touch of reality to an otherwise virtual event. Likewise, with client relationships kept at a distance, a well-chosen gift bridged the gap.
Within corporate gifting, there is an added level of complexity caused by the sheer number of gift recipients involved. This is especially problematic when choosing a one-to-many gift, such as for holidays, rather than a one-to-one gift for recognition and appreciation occasions. As for what corporate gift buyers look for in a gift, that isn’t so different from personal gifting either. They want good quality products (88%), timely delivery (82%) and a wide variety of gifts to choose from (81%) — Swageazy is on a mission to tackle these very fundamental problems by building a scalable & efficient full-stack platform.
Contributing Factors:
An industry study by Coresight research, conducted among 300 corporate gift buyers across companies up to $30 billion in revenues, details the changes the pandemic brought about in the business of corporate gifting and predicts the trends that will carry that business forward —
The study estimates the corporate gifting market will reach $243 billion this year and continue growing at an accelerated 8.1% CAGR through 2024
By comparison, personal gifting is only expected to rise at a 6% CAGR through that time
Approximately 60% of the corporate gift total will be spent on gifts to clients and partners outside the organization and 40% on internal employee recognition and awards
Corporate gifting budgets got a boost too, with more than half of respondents reporting their budgets increased because of Covid
The amount spent on a per-gift basis has also witnessed an increase. Most spent between $25 and $125 on a corporate gift, with the largest percentage reporting the sweet spot between $75 and $100
Why Huddle Invested in “Swageazy”
Swageazy is India’s first all-in-one E-commerce and SaaS platform that provides automated gifting services to enterprises for their employees, customers, and other key stakeholders. They do this through a curated marketplace for relevant company merchandise (commonly known as swag). Swageazy is a scalable and efficient platform for enterprises to automate merchandise procurement and gifting campaigns whilst creating new and proprietary workflows with popular HRMS systems.
At Huddle, we’ve been consistently bullish on backing enablers such as Swageazy, whose core value proposition lies in solving procurement, distribution, and delivery of CPG and FMCG products for enterprises. Enablers like swageazy solve for well-documented inefficiencies of vendor management, distribution, and delivery hurdles.
The founding team (Sameer Wahie and Sneh Setu) comes in with strong corporate experience, having led multiple verticals at companies such as Uber, Oyo, Airtel, Cognizant, and others.
Data (Technopak Report 2018, Coresight Report 2021) suggests the total addressable market size of Gifting is approximately $100bn (including corporate, personal and festive gifting) of which India’s share of corporate gifting is approximately $6bn. The gifting market is growing at a rapid pace, charting a 200% per annum growth rate. The growth of the gifting market in India can be attributed to the rising disposable incomes & increasing influence of western merchandise and goods across the country.
At the moment, there are deep inefficiencies that exist for large enterprises and their merchandise procurement workflows. $6 bn+ is spent on corporate gifting, company swag, and branded merchandise without any scalable and efficient way to manage this spend and calculate ROI. HR departments are routinely plagued with multiple vendor management, lack of transparency, and cost inefficiencies throughout the process. The problem has only been exacerbated by the rise of remote work culture alongside the documented rise of India’s BPO industry, where many global MNCs host their offshore tech teams in India.
Moreover, an increase in marketing activities by leading brands coupled with personalization and customization in gift products are some of the key growth drivers of the gifting industry in India. Factors such as creative packaging, personalized notes, initial engraved boxes, etc together with a seamless buying experience, especially through online platforms are boosting the country’s gifting market.
Founding Team
The founding team (Sameer Wahie and Sneh Setu) comes in with strong corporate experience, having led multiple verticals at companies such as Uber, Oyo, Airtel, Cognizant, and others.
Founders Sameer and Sneh worked together at Uber, where they witnessed and experienced the problem first-hand. Their common experience with the problem at hand led them to take the plunge into creating a solution together.
Congratulations to the Swageazy team for successfully raising 7Cr for their Seed Round. (Read More)
https://bwdisrupt.businessworld.in/article/Swageazy-Secures-INR-7-Cr-In-Seed-Round/06-12-2022-456832/
https://entrackr.com/2022/12/info-edge-leads-rs-7-cr-round-in-gifting-startup-swageazy/
That's all for today! A call out if you are a founder building in the Commerce Enablers space, you can reach us at connect@huddle.work and we look forward to brainstorming with you. If you are an enabler and investor and would like a further look into our ecosystem, then we are happy to dive deep into these sectors alongside you.
