New Pay-later Gift Cards to Cut $10 Billion of Waste

Consumers can say goodbye to the waste of pre-paid gift cards.

Kiind, a new online service launching today across the United States, allows people to email gift cards — but rather than pre-paying and hoping for the best, gift cards sent via Kiind are paid for only when the receiver chooses to use the gift.

“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 $10 billion dollars in pre-paid gift cards will go unclaimed. With Kiind, people can avoid this unnecessary waste.”

“Kiind is convenient and gratifying for me and the people I show appreciation to,” notes Robert Down of Collier’s International. Supported by iOS Passbook, the gift campaign platform provides recipients with geolocated gift reminders. Givers can effortlessly add contacts to Kiind from Salesforce, Gmail, and Mailchimp. Kiind also notifies the giver when a gift has been used, providing new opportunities to follow-up and build relationships with recipients.

Kiind’s gift marketplace includes global brands like Amazon.com, as well as local and boutique business in over 300 US cities. By working with Kiind, retail partners receive more customers while reducing outstanding gift card liabilities and avoiding escheat laws.

As of today, Kiind is available across the United States.

Get started at kiind.me.
For product screenshots and to arrange an interview, visit media.kiind.me.

More details about Kiind

Reducing waste with Kiind
Financial waste
Wasted costs for procurement and delivery
Paying it forward to charity
Reduced environmental impact
Serving retailers to move an industry forward
The future is Kiind

Today, Kiind launches our gift campaign platform to the United States. The gift marketplace includes inventory from Amazon.com — including gift cards and a variety of specific products — and 45 other vendors in over 300 cities, totalling more than 2000 different storefront locations across the USA and Canada.

Kiind aims to make the waste associated with gift cards a thing of the past. We believe good gifts don’t have to be ruined by waste.

Gift cards are modelled on the century-old concept of gift certificates. Pre-paid cards get forgotten in wallets, lost in desk drawers or worse, thrown away because the gift held no value for the recipient. Despite a multitude of digital gifting technologies and startups, the concept of pre-paid gift cards has remained the status quo . . . until Kiind.

Reducing waste with Kiind

This year across North America, roughly $10 billion dollars in pre-paid gift cards will go unclaimed. But, money isn’t the only thing going to waste. Physical pre-paid gift cards also have a much higher procurement and delivery cost, as well as a higher environmental impact, in comparison to digitally delivered gifts and gift cards. With Kiind, people can avoid this unnecessary waste.

Financial waste

This year, Americans who purchase gift cards spend roughly $10 billion dollars giving pre-paid gift cards that will never be used. Consumers will buy $120 billion dollars of gift cards in 2013 and — according to this research conducted by Grant Thornton — 8% to 19% of gift cards are never used. At the high end of the range, it means that Americans will throw away $22 billion in 2013 in their efforts to express appreciation.

This sort of waste is frustrating and unnecessary. While 6 in 10 people hope to receive gift cards — largely because of the the flexibility of the gift — the waste associated with the pre-paid gift card model fails to create confidence for gift givers.

Wasted costs for procurement and delivery

One of the hidden costs of physical gift cards is the time required procure and deliver to the gift card to the recipient. In particular, businesses and professionals who incorporate gifts into their business processes — such as using gifts to show appreciation or reward employees — are keenly aware of the time and effort costs. Digital gift cards significantly reduce the cost associated with selecting and sending gifts.

Kiind is unique from other digital gifting services with it’s concept of gift campaigns. Gift campaigns allow people to send gifts to multiple people simultaneously. Mail-merge functionality means that each gift is personally addressed to the recipient.

Paying it forward to charity

With anywhere from $10 billion to $22 billion to be wasted on prepaid cards this year, we believe that some of that money should go instead to support world changing charities.

During Kiind’s private and limited-public beta testing, we learned that part of the reason recipients fail to use gift cards is that they simply don’t need or want more stuff. Receiving an unwanted gift places recipients in a difficult position: they don’t want let the money, time, and effort of the person who gave to them go to waste, but they also have no desire to use the gift card.

In response, Kiind allows gift recipients to allocate the value of unwanted gifts to charity. Gift givers are able to control whether gifts from their campaigns can be allocated to charity. One insight on gifting is that givers and recipients co-own gifts (this is why gifts are hard to sell, even years after they’ve been given). So, Kiind treats both the giver and recipient as owners of gift, which means that both parties opt-in to support charity. By treating both parties respectfully, we believe that more money will ultimately go towards worthy causes across the US and the globe.

To start, we’ve selected the following charities to support: Big Brothers and Big Sisters, charity: water, The Conservation Fund, Feed the Children, Habitat for Humanity, Kiva, (red), PATH, Operation Homefront,Doctors Without Borders, Red Cross, and the Wikimedia Foundation.

Reduce environmental impact

In 2013, physical gift cards have an estimated annual CO2 footprint of 585,300 tons. That’s more than all the daily air flights in Europe combined. With 8%-19% of all gift cards going unused, that means that tons of C02 are produced needlessly. Digital gift cards have a significantly reduced CO2 footprint compared to physical cards, reducing the environmental impact of gifting. For detailed calculation on the C02 emissions of gift cards, read The Carbon Footprint of Physical Gift Cards.

Serving retailers to move an industry forward

The gift card industry is growing steadily and projected to be worth over $120 billion in 2013. Although retailers still make millions through breakage (the term used for the profit from unused gift cards), breakage is becoming less and less attractive to retailers due to new legislation and accounting practices.

“The regulatory environment, including tax and financial reporting for gift cards, has become increasingly complex by tax, regulatory and financial reporting changes in this area,” cautions Giles Sutton, of Grant Thornton LLP. State governments are cracking down on how pre-paid gift cards are handled by enacting escheatment laws that clawback profits from breakage from retailers under the auspice of retrieving unclaimed property. Meanwhile, retailers want to increase redemption, not breakage because people typically spend more than the face value of the card when redeeming them.

By deferring when a gift is paid for, Kiind helps retailers reduce billions of dollars of outstanding financial liability while driving more customers to them.

The future is Kiind

Kiind is leading the change in gift card industry to making gift giving less wasteful for givers, more convenient and authentic for recipients, and more feasible for retailers. We’re proud to launch across the United States as of today.

Get started at kiind.me.