Gone are the days when you have to worry about what gifts to buy for a friend’s birthday or visit your nearest gift shop to pick up a last-minute gift for someone in the family. Wondering what to gift your favourite people on their special days? How about gifting them an experience? That is exactly what Xoxoday has to offer.
The Bengaluru-based, Mahindra Group-backed firm takes gifting to the next level. From scuba diving, riding a Harley, sericulture tours, owning a farmhouse for a day, dining under a helipad, riding a horse, cruising on a yacht and even milking a cow! Gift your loved ones the experience of a lifetime with the range of options available on this platform. The experiences are not restricted to others. You can gift yourself a tour of the city, try out a new activity, re-discover an old hobby or simply unwind. Co-founded by four friends – Kushal Agrawal, Sumit Khandelwal, Abhishek Kumar and Manoj Agarwal, four years ago, the venture is expanding to a global network soon.
“People today are easily bored and want to try something new and update their social media profiles with experiences and activities. That is where we come in,” says Kushal. Xoxoday facilitates professionals and venture owners to host an experience as well. And it is free. If you’re an artist, you may host arts and craft experiences or if you’re a dancer, you can host dance forms. If you can cook, you can host a meal or if you are a city guide, you can organise a walk and you can even organise a community meetup and so much more. Abhishek further points out that in the entire travel industry, the stay and ticketing are quite organised. “But what happens when you reach a particular destination? What do you do when you’re there? Or you have friends visiting your city and you don’t have too many options to show around.
Initially called Giftxoxo, catering to the corporates, and Frogo, for self-consumption, the two brands recently merged to become Xoxoday. Manoj elaborates: “Gifting an experience was an opportunity for us to launch an alternate to gifting products. And XOXO was branded with the thought of giving gifts with love and affection.”
He recalls that each of them had different experiences in their previous companies that brought together this endeavour. “I used to work with Flipkart during its early days and I noticed gifting contributed significant revenue. Similarly Sumit used to work in Metro. Abhishek was working in the technology field and had studied gifting options in companies abroad. That’s what inspired us in this venture. Gifting in India is a big, old industry since gifts are exchanged on any occasion. We wanted to do something different from tradition.” Xoxoday is available on the web, Google Play Store) and App Store.
