Following our post introducing 12 Hong Kong eCommerce startups that we thought you should know, we met another new company that’s also making waves in the online shopping space.
Originally hailing from South Africa, The Gift Box‘s founder Katie Hawinkels completed a marketing degree from the University of Cape Town before working in banking for several years in London. Upon moving to Hong Kong in June 2010, Katie worked in recruitment and decided to take the leap into entrepreneurship with The Gift Box, a gift registry with a twist.
What is your startup?
The Gift Box is a premium online gift registry and lifestyle shop, offering an extensive range of top-quality products from everyday affordable items to the finest luxury pieces.
Our registry function caters to the needs of bridal couples for wedding gift registries and expectant mothers for baby shower registries. As a bridal couple or expectant mother, The Gift Box gives you the flexibility to personalise your own unique gift list and make gift shopping an easy task for your guests. Best of all, the registry function is absolutely free of charge.
Our “Shop For Yourself” function allows online shoppers around the world the opportunity to purchase any of our top-quality products, be it a gift or just a bit of self spoiling, and have the item sent anywhere in Hong Kong.
How did you come up with this idea?
The idea of The Gift Box was born when my husband and I were planning our own wedding in 2013 and found there to be a shortage of gift registry options in Hong Kong. There are an abundance of online registries available in the UK, Australia, USA and South Africa, but nothing like these in Hong Kong.
Thus we saw a gap in the market and decided to launch The Gift Box to cater to the online registry needs of bridal couples in Hong Kong as well as the needs of everyday online shoppers. Once we launched The Gift Box, the idea of The Baby Box (our baby registry) followed soon after.
Who are you targeting and how big is the market in HK/Asia?
Our target market is primarily the Expat community in Hong Kong as gift registries are commonly used for Western weddings and baby showers. However we see gift registries becoming more popular in the Chinese wedding culture, often being used in addition to Lai See Packets, so our target market is expanding to include a wider Hong Kong community. This target market in Hong Kong is fairly big as a lot of young couples who moved to Hong Kong for work are at an age where they have been dating for a number of years, are recently engaged & planning their weddings, or are just starting their families.
What are your futures plans for your startup?
In the near future I want to continue to grow the business in Hong Kong by increasing our customer base and finding new and exciting products to add to the website. As The Baby Box is still fairly new, my main focus will be on marketing this within the “Hong Kong Mom” community.
However, I would also like to take the business to Singapore and into China further down the line – perhaps 1-2 years from now – as I think there is huge potential for the business to be successful in these two countries. We’ll be focusing on cities with a large number of expats and where there are not many existing competitors in the market already.
1 Benefit and 1 Challenge in the HK startup scene?
One benefit that has to be mentioned regarding the HK Start Up Scene is the simplicity of incorporating and starting a business. HK is quite well known for its high number of entrepreneurs and I think this is largely due to the efficiency and ease with which companies can be started.
Following on from that, and if I may add a second benefit, the HK network is incredible and the power of word of mouth advertising is remarkable. For entrepreneurs who don’t have huge marketing budgets, Hong Kong has to be one of the best places to launch a business as the network alone can result in huge marketing success. That is so long as there are good words being spread!
The biggest challenge I’ve faced in starting my ecommerce business would be the payment gateways on my website. While all the other aspects of launching this business went smoothly and quite quickly, I found the payment gateway set up to be challenging and very time consuming. It took almost two months for the gateway to be up and running on the website, which was not a time delay I needed!
The Gift Box on Startbase.HK: The Gift Box
Katie Hawinkels on Startbase.HK: Katie Hawinkels
The post 5 Questions With Katie Hawinkels, Founder of The Gift Box appeared first on StartupsHK.