GiftGirl Archive

I met with the Gift Girl team at a recent Mashable event and when they noted that they were planning to launch last week, I suggested that they wait a week so that they wouldn’t have to contend with the 200 startups launching product updates last week. They listened and today Gift Girl is launching a new Web site and gift advice site. NY-based Gift Girl provides personalized gift advice for women but the site is targeted towards anyone trying to find the ideal gift for a woman. This means it’s perfect for a man who needs to find the right gift for the right occasion.

The Gift Girl team explained that their matching engine uses an algorithm to identify the right gift based on attributes such as age range, style and personality for the specific woman for whom they’re seeking a gift.

Gift Girl charges an annual subscription fee of $20 and I’ve struggled with this business model choice. Certainly if you use the service and the gift hits the spot, $20 is well worth it but for small gifts, it seems like a relatively high service charge. They explained that if they took a spiff on sales it may lead to questioning about how they are selecting the gifts. I’d like to see a per-use option as well for somewhere around $6. They could also setup a rebate program where the gift purchaser receives the affiliate commission – that’d be hot.

Gift Girl needs to create a widget and market it to bloggers around the holidays. In heavily male-dominated categories, their service and widget could do very well.

To help promote Fashion Week here in NYC, Gift Girl created a portal site featuring video, photos, interviews and Twitter postings. If you are looking for media coverage of Fashion Week, there is a good bit of video on the site. MyItThings partnered with GiftGirl to create the site.