Gifts — from me to you

From key chains to coffee mugs, the youth in Chennai add a personal touch to all their gifts. Deeptha Sreedhar talks to youngsters who have got custom-made gifts done for friends and family.

June 22, 2014 08:42 pm | Updated 09:58 pm IST

Gifting ideas: Customise your gifts.

Gifting ideas: Customise your gifts.

“Everyone owns a pen drive and most of them look alike. How to distinguish mine from others just by looking at it? I tried personalising it,” exclaims Preetha Shankar, 20, student. Shopping no longer requires one to scour through busy markets or stroll around huge malls. Since everything is available at the click of a button in E-shopping, the trend of E-gifting has also caught on with youngsters. However exquisite or simple the gifts maybe, they were one among hundred such similar articles that people exchanged. “Such common gifts were devoid of the personal touch, hence I prefer gifting from online portals. It saves time in placing order, going to collect them and then gift-wrap them after all this. Since E-gifting portals offer all these things at one go, they are becoming popular.” explains Preethi Sathiyanarayanan. Here are some interesting stories from youngsters who had gone for custom-made gifts:

I was amazed to know that even chocolate wrappers and magazine covers can be custom designed. Online gifting portals have made life easy with regard to return gifts. From engraving the giver and receiver’s names to shipping them off to the respective addresses, they take care of everything. Apart from Myntra and Flipkart, I found prestogifts.com good for customising. dilsebol.com, redmoments.com and tinysurprise.com are among the other popular sites among youth for customised gifts. - VISHNU RAJAMANICKAM, 22, Structural design engineer

Wishpicker.com is a great online portal to choose customised gifts. My parents are fun-loving. So for their wedding anniversary, I decided to gift them a caricature portrait that I designed in their site. Certain experience gifts such as hot air balloon flying are currently unavailable in Chennai. I can’t wait for such exotic gifts to come up! - MAHESH BALAN, 23, IT professional

The best part about online gifting portals is that we get to customise almost every gift article. Printed coffee mugs seemed very common to gift. However zoomin.com provided cool to hot mugs, which had a hidden printed photo coming alive every time something hot was poured in it. Since then I’ve been a regular at that site. - PREETHI SATHIYANARAYANAN, 20, student

Ringing in a friend’s birthday at the stroke of 12 in the night is a very special moment. However visiting friends in another city, that too at dot 12 is not possible every time. I opted to surprise one of my friends by getting a cake and a bouquet delivered at mid-night, through chennaionlineflorists.com. The service comes at quite a price, but nevertheless, it was the experience that mattered. - SREERAMAN SAMPATH, 22, Mechanical engineer

Birthdays come in number if one studies in a class of 55 like I do. Most surprises are organised in the last minute and I found it difficult trying to strike a balance between a useful and unique gift for my friends. That is when printvenue.com came to my rescue. I’ve gifted personalised pen drives, mobile cases, laptop cases and wallets for my classmates. The best part about these gifts is that the product along with customisation (i.e with name and a simple logo) comes at a very reasonable price. - PREETHA SHANKAR, 20, Student

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