Welcome to TheGift.com. We just launched today (in beta) and couldn’t be more excited! We built TheGift specifically with your gifting needs in mind to make shopping for gifts a little easier, a little more social and a lot more fun.

At TheGift, our expertise is curation – we’ll make sure we help you find the right gift for the right occasion at the right time, every time. We’re sourcing tens of thousands of great gifts featuring many of the brands you know and trust as well as some exciting new gift idea providers.

We also understand that in this world of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, etc., your friends and peers are helping to ever shape your purchase behavior (come on’ you can admit), or maybe you are the one helping to shape theirs. . As a result, shopping for gifts, for any occasion, has never been more social! So look around, “Like” something, tweet how awesome our gift line up is, sign up for our email newsletter and don’t forget to take our fun quiz to help you choose the right gifting persona.

By way of background, TheGift is the newest entrepreneurial initiative from 1-800-Flowers.com. At 1-800-Flowers.com, we pride ourselves on delivering smiles with a broad range of great gifts brands and services. Hopefully, you are familiar with Celebrations.com, our media and content site that delivers party ideas and inspiration to help celebrate all of life’s occasions. Celebrations was launched as a skunk works project about 3 years ago with a small NYC based team. It is part of that team, along with some new additions, that is now bringing you TheGift. Like a true startup, we are scrappy; we have been sharing office space with partners, operating with small budgets and a lot of heart.

The idea for TheGift was conceived in January, 2011 as a way of leveraging a URL we have long owned in order to help bring us one step closer to having our family of brands be top of mind for all of your gifting needs. We moved fast – skunk-works fast – begging for budget, scoping and planning and finally starting to build in early July with an ambitious goal of being up and running in time for the year-end holiday season. We have our great partners at Dotbox to thank for building and designing our amazing site just a few short months, our dear friends at TargetCast:TCM for housing us, and also, to our Marketing and Business Development leads, Sharmy Nadkarni and Erik Keller, respectively. While it hasn’t been easy (mom said nothing worth having ever is!), it has been fun, and we are thankful to everyone in our entire organization for believing in us, our ideas and more importantly, in the need to continually innovate and invest for the future.

Here are a few links we think you should check out:

• Great content to answer all those gifting etiquette questions and help break down the latest trends.
• Our rock star panel of Experts.
• TheGift GPS – a fun quiz to help you navigate to the perfect gift persona.
• Our Same-Day Delivery storefront

Remember, our baby is still very new, and there will undoubtedly be some bugs (how else could we learn from our mistakes!). We encourage you to send any glitches you may find as well as your suggestions on how we can enhance TheGift. We know that we have created a very good site – one we’re proud of; but it’s only with help from our customers that we can turn it into a great site. You can email me direct at jon(at)thegift.com.

And please, sign up for our newsletter, follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook.

Stay tuned for new features to be rolling out non-stop through this holiday season, including occasion reminders, a daily deal, wish lists and social curation. Happy Gifting!
Regards,

Jon Mandell
General Manager, TheGift.com