Those of you who joined us in London at the 2012 The Gift Card, Gift Voucher and Reloadable Card Summit, will recall Wrapp, a Sweden-based mobile gift card and retail service, backed by Greylock Partners and Atomico, driving innovation in the estimated $100 Billion industry.
The app has launched across the pond and was unveiled at U.S. retailers including Fab.com, Gap, H&M, Sephora, Brooklyn Industries,
The Wall Street Journal, Wayfair, and others, yesterday.
The service, billing itself as the anti-Groupon, offers a way to drive customers and activate higher sales in-stores by allowing users to give and share $5-$15 gift cards to friends (the app utilizes the Facebook social graph), which recipients can redeem in store. Some of the cards are available for free and once posted to a friend's wall, others can also add money to the card. "
Participating merchants report that each sale averages four to six times the value of the free gift card they let Wrapp users give to their friends."
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Wrapp launched in Sweden in November, and more recently opened its service in the U.K. and Norway. Since then, it has amassed about 165,000 active users that have gifted more than 1.4 million cards."
The debut is receiving a lot buzz because the service sits on the very intersection of the savvy consumer trend of using smartphones to save money in brick and mortar stores, with the collective discount phenomena of services like Groupon, to help retailers bring in in-store shoppers through the influence of their friends and family and because of the synthesis with Facebook's social graph, it can also be leveraged to target certain social and demographics shopper segments as well as gather insights on the market and campaigns.
It will be interesting to see how Wrapp transforms the Gift Card space and its traction, especially during peak holiday shopping season.
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