There’s already a huge market for gift cards, and there’s even greater potential if you also give them social hooks, instant gratification, and targeted marketing. In 2006, a study showed that gift cards were the second most given gift in the U.S., and Wrapp estimates the size of the gift card market in the United States at $100 billion.
Compare those numbers with their eight week long test launch in Sweden. In that short period of time, they were able to reach roughly 1/3 of the Facebook users in Sweden, which is around 1.84 million users. In this testing period they were also able to target 258000 people in the coveted 25-30 age range.
“Wrapp is targeting a huge market by leveraging two mega-trends: social networks and smartphones,” said Zennström, who is joining Wrapp’s board of directors. “If anyone can disrupt the gift card industry for the better – make it larger by taking it digital, mobile and social – it’s the talented team at Wrapp.”
Wrapp was started around nine months ago by Sendit and Rebtel co-founder Hjalmar Winbladh as well as a team of young entrepreneurs including Andreas Ehn, Spotify’s founding chief technology officer; Carl Fritjofsson, former strategy advisor to Groupon.se; Aage Reerslev, founder of mobile browser Squace; and Fabian Mansson, former CEO of H&M and Eddie Bauer.
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