A gift-card given, is a gift-card thrown away, as a wise man once said. A verbose and fake idiom, but in reality about 8%-19% of gift cards are never used. For Kiind, a Canadian-based startup, this means waste: financial waste, environmental waste, delivery and time waste… it’s just so wasteful, and Kiind aims to fix that with its new gift-card platform which only charges a giver, “when the receiver chooses to use the gift.”
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Actually, if you were to take Kiind’s press release at face value, we’ve got a gift-card crisis on our hands.
“If you bought a gift card for someone this year, there’s a good chance it went to waste — along with your money,” says Leif Baradoy, founder and CEO of Kiind. “This year across North America, roughly US$10-billion dollars in pre-paid gift cards will go unclaimed. With Kiind, people can avoid this unnecessary waste.”
Despite waste, there is an interesting social aspect to Kiind. Giving a gift-card is tricky business. It’s a social transaction all with the pretense of kindness and gratification thrown into the mix. More often than not, recipients do not need or want more stuff, and so despite not wanting to let the giver down, they have no desire to use the gift card. Kiind recognises this, and allows recipients to pass on the value of an unwanted gift-card to charity (if the giver has allowed this beforehand). This respects both parties, and gets rid of any guilt there might be associated with passing a gift on.
Kiind was invested in by Metalab through its Design Capital programme, and is supported by iOS Passbook. Kiind’s marketplace is kicking off impressively, sporting Amazon products as well as local and boutique businesses across 300 US cities.
