In 2025, Zest powered 17X more multi-recipient gift sales than just a couple years earlier.
How did the first-of-its-kind gifting platform drive this much growth in such a short span of time?
Over the years, Zest has continued to heed the needs and dreams of online brands, reimagine and refine the online gifting experience, prioritize close customer conversations, and relentlessly keep on its quest to capture gifting intent at every turn of the customer journey and make it better.
Keep reading for a closer look at how one li’l gift note app grew into a total gifting powerhouse, culminating in our biggest year of growth yet.
How Zest Gifting Got Its Start: An App for One-to-one Gifting
The reality today is that heading straight to your favorite online store and sending a gift (or 100) is becoming just another ecommerce shopping norm. As consumers crave the ability to send gifts with the same ease as shopping for themselves — complete with personalized notes and modern delivery methods, like text or email — brands have been on the hunt for tools that can help them meet demand.
Until recently, those tools simply didn’t exist.
Third-party marketplaces like Amazon and Sendoso have lightly scratched the itch in years past, providing some relief for consumers and corporate gifters trying to send gifts to one or tons of people.
But in turn, those same marketplaces rob consumers of a brand’s experience (and snag a sizable margin of every sale), all while making it harder for shoppers to find what they want since they’re suddenly sifting through a sea of brands and not just the one they’re eyeing to give.
Recognizing a growing gap in online gifting demands and the tools available to brands and shoppers alike, Zest was born.
This hunch that shoppers want a gifting experience that’s fast and cohesive proved to be a cold, hard fact, and the appetite for better gifting experiences directly on a brand’s website has led to massive growth for the gifting platform.
In the early days, Zest was just a simple digital gift message app; an embedded “Send as a Gift” button on product or cart pages. Gifters who clicked on the button chose a digital greeting card, added their own message, and delivered the gift to the recipient via text or email.
Brands found value, but the app had a lot of room for growth and left too many gifting needs untouched:
- What about other gift customizations or add-ons, like wrapping paper or handwritten notes?
- Corporate gifters looking to send hundreds (or even thousands) of gifts would have to go through the checkout once per recipient — yikes.
- Shoppers searching for the perfect bulk gifts for their next big event or conference were left with little or no options.
The first iteration of Zest was perfect for one person wanting to send one gift to one other person, but it didn’t take long to realize that the world of gifting was a whole lot bigger than that.
What Zest Built To Balance Customer Behavior and Brand Needs for Online Gifting
Shoppers sending one-off gifts is a year-round occurrence. Think birthdays, anniversaries, housewarmings, weddings — these events aren’t tied to any single season or holiday. Instead, they’re personal moments that happen every day of the year.
What Zest’s original app was able to solve was the stress an individual consumer felt when trying to send an online gift. At the time, most brands hadn’t embraced gifting and there was no way to add a digital gift message in the checkout. And even if there was, the shopper had to sleuth around for their recipient’s address (or, worse, ask the recipient outright what their best address is and risk spoiling a surprise).
Zest was able to add a layer of much-needed tech to the one-to-one gifting issue through its digital gift notes and delivery system, which let a shopper send a gift sans address altogether. All the gifter needed was a phone number or email address, and the recipient would enter their own shipping address upon unwrapping their digital gift.
The issue? Zest’s original app was a handy fit for the average consumer — a nice-to-have tool for online stores looking to up their customer experience (CX) — but it didn’t solve a much larger pain point felt by the brands themselves: one-to-many gifting.
The problem with online gifting? It’s unbearably slow and unscalable.
While Zest’s digital gift delivery and accompanying gift notes made for a delightful CX, it didn’t tackle the massive problem brands faced with multiship orders (or orders going to more than one recipient) — the sheer manual effort of it all.
Imagine a company’s founder trying to send gifts to their 84 employees at the end of the year. For the founder, they usually have to reach out to the brand they want to buy with directly. Sometimes this looks like an email or potentially a phone call, but most of the time this journey entails finding a contact form buried in the footer of a website. Once the shopper navigates this outdated first step, they then just….have to wait for a response.
Meanwhile, someone working for the brand has to field these inquiries (exceptionally giftable brands are trying to respond to thousands of these bad boys throughout the year). Then they have to reach back out to the curious gifter, and that’s when the heavy lifting really starts up. Hashing out details, perfecting what’s in the present, double-checking inventory, manually updating SKUs in spreadsheets, triple-checking recipient addresses…woof.
All in, it’s not uncommon for a single one-to-many gift order to take weeks to process. Not only is this a far cry from a fully optimized ecommerce experience, but it’s a blow to brands that see an influx of gift orders and have no way to sustainably manage all of them.
Sending a lot of gifts? Zest was made for that.
After many, many check-ins and chats with brands trying to tap their gifting channel’s potential, it was clear that there was more to it all than a handsome digital gift note.
If we really wanted to help brands and their customers quench their gifting thirst, we needed to expand our platform. Zest needed to grow beyond one-to-one digital gift delivery and fully embrace what shoppers and brands both needed most: an easier way to send, track, and manage one-to-many gift orders.
Self-service Storefronts Launched for Corporate Gifters
In late 2022, Zest launched self-service Storefronts. Geared toward corporate gifters, who typically have to buy heaps of gifts in one fell swoop, this technological leap erased the endless back-and-forth between eager gifters and brands overnight. In this new seamless flow, shoppers could browse a brand’s gifting catalog, pick out a gift, add a personalized gift note, upload hundreds of recipient details, and checkout in just a few minutes.
And for brands, these massive orders were automatically processed, so corporate gifting teams could finally kiss unending spreadsheets goodbye. Self-service multi-recipient gifting was the first time these teams could get out of the gift processing bottleneck and dedicate time to other parts of the gifting channel, like marketing, pipeline, loyalty, development, and account management.
Early Zest adopters like Porter Road and gift box powerhouse Giften Market saw fast success in their first holiday season with Storefronts. These brands were able to see huge revenue uplift, increase average gift order value by 25%, save weeks of time on project management, and grow their base of corporate gifters by 300%.
The early signs were all pointing up and to the right, so that meant it was time for Zest to keep building.
Concierge Gifting Tools Join the Mix
Self-service Storefronts gained momentum, especially with the release of products like bulk Event Storefronts and updated features like white-labeled Storefronts, which put the Zest brand in the background and are giving our partners the keys to:
- host Zest on their own domain.
- send their own gifting transactional emails via integrations with tools like Klaviyo.
- offer customer accounts in a branded portal where gifters can check receipts, shipping statuses and more.
A growing sentiment from Zest partner brands, though, was the wish to bring their concierge gift orders — high-touch, highly manual corporate gift orders — within the same ecosystem as their self-service gifting. In 2024, Zest was able to give our roster of brands a new gifting product within our platform: Concierge Gifting.
Concierge is the perfect complement to the existing self-service features. It allows brands to offer high-touch experiences to their corporate clients while still automating many of the tedious backend processes.
With Zest’s unified gifting platform designed to serve every gifter regardless of how they want to order, brands are now fully empowered to scale their gifting channels and capture their piece of this exploding market.
Concierge was a game-changer for brands embracing the new product during the 2024 holiday gifting surge. Gifting teams that were once bogged down with relentlessly processing every gift order by hand could give more attention to high-value white-glove customers within the same platform.
But with every conceivable corporate gifting scenario ushered into modern ecommerce trends and practices, it was high time to revisit the everyday online shopper and brush up on the growing consumer gifting market.
2025: The Year of Consumer Gifting
With the most pressing pain points for brands and corporate gifting resolved, Zest, in a sense, returned to its roots — the consumer gifting experience.
In the years since the original Zest app launched in the Shopify App Marketplace, the company had a fully immersive front-row seat to the ecommerce gifting landscape. We saw demand surging, brands unlocking new revenue, and a desire for one last piece to the gifting puzzle: a native multiship Shopify Checkout for everyday shoppers.
By 2025, the add-on gift message in the checkout was a fairly common experience. A handful of apps have popped up over the years that meet the most basic of gifting needs, but they still lacked some of the features brands have been begging for.
For example, brands still wanted to give shoppers an option to deliver gift messages digitally, complete with a branded and thoughtfully designed digital gift note that bolstered the overall brand experience. They also wanted to give gift recipients the ability to track their gifts as well as the option to opt into their brand marketing.
And lastly, something relatively unheard of in consumer gifting, brands wanted an easy purchase journey for shoppers who wanted to send more than one gift (but fewer than the average corporate gift size) in a single transaction without ever leaving the checkout.
Taking into consideration brand demands and changing shopper behaviors, Zest totally revamped its approach to consumer gifting and launched two new proucts: Gift Notes and Multiship Checkout.
It’s a checkout flow akin to the hyper-optimized DTC Shopify checkout experience that’s the gold standard today, enhanced by Zest’s signature digital gifting features that surprise and delight recipients.
Picture it: Any purchase can now become a seamless gift for one or many people. Different products can be sent to 10 different addresses accompanied by 10 different gift messages in one transaction all from the same Shopify checkout people know and love.
With Zest Consumer Gifting products, recipients can:
- Open up personalized digital gift notes complete with package tracking details (no more "Where's my gift?" messages).
- Engage with brands and convert into high-value email subscribers (these aren't cold leads—they're customers who just received and enjoyed your product). For example, imagine getting steaks from Good Ranchers and automatically receiving cooking tips.
- Send thank-you notes back to the gifter instantly for a more memorable gifting moment.
(Pssst, peep this 60-second demo to see the magic in action, or see it live on partners like Caroline’s Cakes, David’s Cookies, UNTUCKit, and ChappyWrap.)
The More Brands Talked About Gifting, the More Gifts They Sold
Zest has worked tirelessly to yank the online gifting experience into the world of modern ecommerce, but the platform could have fizzled out if not for the changing mindset and marketing practices of today’s leading brands.
As gifting stepped (er, irrefutably leapt) out of the shadows, so did the language brands use around gifting. Remember the kinda painful description of the gifting process when Zest was just getting started?
It’s safe to say that gifting is no longer sequestered to a website’s footer. With so many paths to purchase gifts at their fingertips, shoppers have the flexibility they’re used to in ecommerce, and they’re no longer strong-armed into filling out contact forms or making phone calls.
Finally outfitted with optimized gifting tools, online brands are prominently featuring gifting on product description pages (PDPs), across homepage headers, in ads, and entire emails. Brands rose to the moment, and it paid off.
The change in tone (and general hype) around gifting was palpable in 2025. No longer an afterthought or unscalable burden, gifting channels were finally free to grow as big as a brand could imagine.
Zest Powered 17X More Multi-recipient Gift Sales in 2025
Zest gives online brands the tools they need to meet any gifting intent head-on. When equipped with truly optimized tech that was built with shoppers and brands in mind, sending a gift to one or hundreds of people in a single checkout becomes second nature — and the numbers are in to back that up.
Through 2025, Zest more than doubled its brand partnerships. Iconic brands like Venchi, Momofuku, Tate’s Bake Shop, and Fishwife joined the gifting fold, giving customers a top-tier experience in sending one or hundreds of gifts.
By leveraging Zest’s full suite of gifting features, partner brands sold more than 17X more gifts in 2025. Corporate gifting Storefronts, Concierge, and consumer products Gift Notes and Multiship Checkout captured more gift purchases than anticipated, crushing Zest’s own goals for gifting growth.
First-year Zest users doubled their gifting channels while brands that have a couple Zest-fueled years under their belt saw continued year-over-year growth.
What’s Next for 2026 and the Future of Online Gifting?
Consumer demand isn’t slowing down. Ecommerce brands aren’t bringing their gifting channels to a screeching halt. Instead, both parties are digging into gifting harder than ever.
For shoppers, brands offering optimized gifting have unwrapped the exact experiences they’ve been after for years — seamless personalization, easy recipient upload, simple checkout, and unmatched flexibility. It’s gifting on their terms, and that’s exactly what snags and nurtures deep customer loyalty.
Brands have been able to transform the problem child of growth channels into a leader for sales and customer acquisition, and there’s no stuffing this lucrative channel back into the footer.
Zest is leaning into its roots and continuing its conversations with leading brands to uncover any missing pieces to the gifting puzzle. (There are also some big stakes already planted in our roadmap, but you’ll just have to stay tuned to see what those are.)
