Online gift store makes value pledge
The launch of online gift store redribbon.ie represents a step into new territory for founder James Lenehan.
Lenehan, who runs Win Win, Ireland’s biggest corporate incentives firm, is trying his hand for the first time at a direct consumer offering.
Redribbon.ie offers experience based gifts -from hotel breaks, through beauty treatments to pony trekking – designed to appeal to price savvy customers.
Unlike existing experience based gift sites, prices are pitched relatively low. While the site does offer premium gifts -like a 14-day trip to Vietnam for €1,400 per person, most of the offerings cost a lot less.
For €25, for instance, you can buy someone the gift of an eyelash tint and brow shaping session. For €45, you get a voucher for a free main course at one of a number of Dublin restaurants.
‘‘Everything is about value these days,” said Lenehan, who regards existing online experience gift sites as very overpriced. ‘‘We already had so many suppliers that it made sense to try this.”
Lenehan has invested some €150,000 in the new venture. The site has just gone live with a choice of 600 gifts, but the aim is to increase the total to 3,000.
‘‘This is not a short-term investment, so I felt I might as well start it now as in 2011,” he said.
As well as specific gifts, the site is selling a red ribbon voucher, which allows recipients to buy anything they can find on the site.
Lenehan said that this would be a very flexible service, and holders of vouchers would be able to swap them or use them in part for whatever they wanted.
Lenehan said part of his motivation was to give his suppliers a ‘‘business to consumer’’ channel for their products, and the offering had allowed him to negotiate better rates for his other services as a result.
He said the Irish market for vouchers was worth €250 million last year, and he believed he had a good chance of winning a slice of that. ‘‘There’s probably a €5 million market out there for us,” he said.
