I had always spent a lot of time trying to find the perfect gifts for friends and family. It's very difficult to be thoughtful without putting in a lot of effort!
That’s what lead to the very first version of our hampers – I couldn't find anything for my girlfriend's Dad at Christmas that had purpose and meaning, so I went about filling a small gift box with all sorts of weird and wonderful brands that I loved the look of and that had some sentiment to experiences we'd shared throughout the year. Luckily for me, it went down a treat! For co-founder Victoria, in the 8 years I’ve known her I don’t think anyone has ever received a thoughtless gift from her. When I started explaining the concept she immediately reeled off a load of ideas and knew she was the perfect person to get on board.
Our vision is to make gifting both thoughtful and effortless. We have four guiding values – strive for quality, have purpose, champion independents, think out of the ordinary – which we come back to in any decision we make. It really helps in keeping us focused and stops us from straying away from what we want to stand for and want to achieve. When we're looking for new brands to work with, we make sure that they share understand these values as well.
For us it has been the openness and willingness of the brands we work with. We are still very new and learning the ropes as we go. When we started, I in particular was worried that we wouldn’t get the brands we wanted on board and our 'why' message wouldn’t get across. However, it’s been amazing how each brand we have partnered with has taken a genuine interest in our vision for Curated & Hampered as well as helped us spread the word, which we are always grateful for! The beauty about working with smaller, independent brands is that there is a great community feel and everyone wants to help each other out.
We work with some of the most exciting, independent brands who share in a regard for purpose and quality in what they do. While showcasing our brands' identity, it was also important for us to forge our own path and find our own voice. Bringing these brands to our customers’ attention, we think of ourselves as discoverers – rather than hold our discoveries close to our chest, we love sharing them with our customers. This is most definitely reflected in our tone of voice and brand identity.
With the rise of social media, creating that memorable first impression is becoming not only more important but also more challenging. As the majority of our customers receive our hampers as gifts we knew that each of our brand values needed to shine through clearly to turn them into customers that wanted to allow a loved one to experience the exciting feeling of opening up our gifts. In that sense, the packaging is incredibly important to us. We spent a lot of time perfecting the boxes and the way the products were presented. Each hamper comes with a story-card that suggests how the products should be used and really brings them to life – and this really emphasizes our value of having purpose.
We were struggling to find a supplier that was both affordable and easy to work with. No Issue not only have a great looking website, it is also so easy to use and navigate. From selecting the type of tissue paper all the way through to uploading your design, the whole process took all of 5 minutes.
Perhaps the main reason, however, was that you specialise and focus on tissue paper so we knew the quality was going to be exactly what we wanted, especially for how important that is to our brand. From struggling to find a supplier to seeing beautiful displays of previous brands you'd worked with on Instagram, it was a no brainer once we came across you guys.