How to Start Personalized Gift Business Online

Summary

Are you looking for a business idea that’s both profitable and meaningful?

Then, personalized gifts could be the answer.

The global personalized gifts industry is expected to grow and reach USD 53,948.50 million by 2032.

As per the report the market was worth USD 30,754.10 million in 2023. and is expected to

But the real value of personalized gifts isn’t just financial! They create emotional connections that go beyond the act of buying and selling. Think back to the last time you received a gift that was truly made just for you. Remember the joy you felt as you unwrapped it?

You can create that feeling for others by starting a personalized gift business. Offering custom-made gifts like engraved jewelry, photo albums, etc. allows customers to express their love and appreciation for their loved ones. Each gift becomes a tangible reminder of the special bond between two people.

As the creator of these unique and meaningful gifts, you can make a real difference in people’s lives.

So, if you are thinking of starting a personalized gift business, it can be your win-win solution for starting a new venture in this ever-growing industry. Here it is, literally everything you need to figure out the question: “how to start a personalized gift business?”

Find Product Ideas for Your Target Audience

When starting a customized gift business, it is important to have clarity on your target audience. As it will help you to understand your audience better, and on the basis of that, you can decide your products. You can either target B2B or B2C businesses or both of them. B2C means dealing directly with end customers. Whereas B2B segments include business audiences that you want to target.

It is better to start with B2C as it will help you to learn more and create your profile. Then later on, you can move to B2B easily. Knowing your market and target audience gives you more clarity about your business and its value. It helps businesses to focus more on making customer’s experiences better.

Thoughtful Gifts to Sell Online

Here are some of the best business ideas to help you select the right one for your venture.

1. Wellness Gifts

Over the past five years, interest in self-care and wellness has significantly increased, as reflected in Google Search Trends. Between 2019 and 2020, self-care-related searches surged by 250%. This trend has continued to grow, with searches in 2024 showing an approximate 50% increase in searches worldwide. Put simply, this sustained growth underscores the growing prominence of self-care and wellness in daily life.

From gratitude journals to skincare subscription boxes, there are different product ideas you can consider.

Idea in Action: Birchbox offers a gift box subscription with high-end beauty and grooming products.

(Image Source)

2. Gifts for Gardening and Nature Niche

Home gardening is blooming right now. According to a report, approximately 54.3% of Gen Z and 56.4% of Gen Y respondents plan to spend more time gardening in 2024. With that there is also an increase in plant lovers and plant parents looking for gardening-related products.

Idea in Action: The garden salsa seed kit from Spade to Fork is one of the best gift ideas. The seed kit has everything gardeners need to grow salsa essentials, like cherry tomatoes, jalapeños, cilantro, and green onions. The kit also includes compostable pots, soil discs, plant markers, and a growing guide, all packed in eco-friendly packaging.

(Image Source)

You can also sell personalized mugs or t-shirts for garden lovers with designs of plants, or you can gift them personalized gardening tool boxes with engravings, and much more.

Try out the our product design software and let customers create custom gifts with plant designs or gardening puns!

3. Productivity Gifts

In 2023, with the increasing trend of working from home, productivity gifts have become a popular choice for businesses to show their appreciation to their employees. For example, gift kits that include high-quality planners, motivational stickers, time-blocking templates, habit trackers, or to-do list notepads.

Idea in Action: SwagUp is a promotional products supplier that offers various high-quality branded items bundled together. Companies can purchase packs as a gift for employees.

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4. Customized Home Decor

With people spending more time at home, personalized home decor items can be a great gift idea. Consider personalized gift ideas like throw pillows, wall art, and doormats with that feature unique designs or personalized messages.

Idea in Action: Personalization Mall offers a variety of customized home decor items, including throw pillows, canvas prints, and doormats.

(Image Source)

Moreover, if you own a gift personalization business and want to increase your sales, it is best to incorporate a product design tool into your storefront.

Looking to offer customized home decor items?

5. Customized Travel Accessories

Personalized travel accessories are a thoughtful gift option. Be it friends, family, or colleagues, these gifts always make the person feel special.

Consider items like customized luggage tags, passport holders, and travel journals. You could even create customized travel bundles that include items like travel-sized toiletries, noise-canceling headphones, and portable chargers.

Idea in Action: Paravel is a sustainable travel brand that offers a range of customizable travel accessories, including luggage tags and passport holders.

(Image Source)

Interested in offering your customers the ability to create their own customized travel accessories?

Get a bag design software and let your customers design their own personalized luggage tags, passport holders, and more!

6. Gifts that Appeal to Enthusiasts

When people are passionate about something, they are more likely to invest in getting or giving those products to like-minded people. Gadget lovers, chefs, fitness enthusiasts, car accessory lovers, etc. – once you figure out what niche you want to cater to, you can start selling.

Idea in Action: Buy Olympia is perfect for people interested in art. This online store brings together renowned independent artists from around the United States. Shoppers can buy gifts like Gift Cards, keychains, mugs and glassware, postcards, and more.

(Image Source)

Take your personalized gift business a step ahead by enabling customers to design for themselves using a Gift Design Tool. Ready templates, text editor, artwork, and live pricing – click to read more about all the features.

(Enable Product Customization To Reach More Shoppers, and Create a Loyal Customer Base)

It’s Time to Create Your Gift Business Plan

When planning, deciding the budget for your business is a crucial phase. Here, the more detailed you are with a gift business plan, the better it is for your business. Because it helps you get the necessary insights and make better decisions for your personalized gift business. You can know which verticals require more investment. On the basis of your budget planning, you can define your next quarter’s plans.

Some of the major reasons for planning a budget are:

• You know the flow of investment
• Decreases unnecessary expenses
• Have more clarity on your business verticals
• Take better decision in regards to future trends
• Can help in attracting the right business investors.

When you are starting a customized gift business, you will have to take care of a lot of things, like knowing your market, launch website, marketing, offline store (if needed), each product cost, etc. Proper planning will give you a better understanding of where your attention should be.

Just imagine, if you have multiple things on your plate but don’t know where to focus more, invest more, customers’ needs, and more. It can become chaotic when your planned budget will come to your rescue.

Legal Work

Starting a personalized gift business means you need to be ready to do lots of paperwork. Every business needs to have the necessary licenses and registration work to be done. So, before starting any business, you should contact the business registration offices and complete all necessary paperwork.

Get all the necessary licenses needed in your district to carry out business. Once this is done, you can reach out to the required logistics and vendor management companies. Your business will be online and so timely delivery is necessary. This is when logistics and vendor management will come to your rescue.

Have an idea for a personalized gifts business?. If yes, then get started with getting a web-to-print solution. Additionally, get a solution that provides you ready-to-launch store along with a Product Design Tool. ; start your custom gift business today! Click to know more and start your custom gift business today!

How to Take Personalized Gift Business Online

Once you are done with all the necessary business registrations, next comes taking the business online. As everything has shifted in the online space, investing smartly in these digital resources can bring you good returns. To succeed, there are many important parts to consider. Let’s go through them one by one:

1. Select e-Commerce platform

Today there are thousands of platforms available which help to create an eStore platform. Each of them has their merits and demerits. Some of the famous and most used platforms are: Shopify, Joomla, Drupal, etc.

As per your requirements, you can choose the platform to create an entire eStore from scratch. For example, do you self-host your store or want a platform that provides hosted eStore? The same way, compare the features and, of course, the pricing. Shopify plans are generally more affordable than Magento’s. However, if your budget allows, Magento is one of the best platforms to consider!

2. Finalize Features

Once you have selected a suitable solution for developing a website, the next step is finalizing features. Depending on your business model and recent market trends, you can define various features for your website.

Some of the basic and much-needed features for your personalized gift business are: payment gateway for online transactions, add to cart functionality, adding items in wish lists, detailed product description, clear images of various personalized gifts, and more.

One of the best ways to define your features is by doing thorough market research, studying your competitors, etc. This will help you know in depth and exact things your customers need.

3. Choose Development Partner

When it comes to developing your eStore for your customized gifts business, there are two options available:

• Freelancing
• Choosing the right technical partner

Of course, each of them has their benefits but I reaching out to the right technical partner is the key. Getting in touch with the right technical partner can help you leverage their expertise and build a successful business.

A trusted technical partner brings industry expertise, a strong client base, and access to a team of skilled professionals to guide startups effectively. Unlike freelancers, they offer robust security measures and comprehensive support to help your business grow. For instance, PrintXinstancepand provides a seamless web-to-print storefront solution to take your business online and achieve your goals.

This is a low-code solution that offers multiple features and functionalities like pricing management, quotation management, end-to-end order management, and much more.

(Features of Our Web to Print Storefront)

Hiring experts for this job means a dedicated team of business analysts, designers, developers, and marketers will support you at every step of building a successful business.

In short, for those seeking a cost-effective solution without the need to build a website from scratch, the web-to-print storefront offers a streamlined way to take your business online with minimal investment.

(A Glimpse of What Your Web Store Will Look Like)

See for yourself the magic of a web-to-print store.

After finding the right web-to-print solutions provider, the next step is to decide on the most important aspect of your store—the products.

This section will guide you on how you can provide personalized gifts and make your custom gifts business a success.

How You Can Offer Personalized Gifts in Your Store

Personalized gifts include a wide spectrum of products like Mugs, Greeting cards, Pillows, T-shirts, Jewelry sets, etc. Based on the audience for your customized gifts business, that you can finalize.

The important part is how you want to go about personalization in these products. Because when it comes to personalization, people have different choices. How would you accommodate them in your offerings?

Imagine, your customers want to send a personalized gift to their family members or friends. They call you at the shop, or while placing orders online they write down specifications like designs, colors, etc. On the basis of this, you create the needed design.

This is the conventional way but often comes with a risk of going wrong with the given directions.

This is when a product design tool or 3D configurator integrated with your online store can help

1. Product Design Tool

Integrating a product designer tool into your website provides your customers with the ease to create their own designs from a range of given products. This decreases unnecessary, redundant communication with your customers.

Some of the most advanced features of the product design tool are:

• Ready Artworks: Customers can browse a large library of pre-made designs, templates, and artwork and use them to create amazing personalized gifts.
• Custom Fonts: The tool integrates a variety of preloaded fonts, allowing customers to make their text stand out and make their gifts more personalized.
• Live Pricing: Let your customers see real-time price updates. This feature ensures customers see cost changes as they customize the design, avoiding any surprises at checkout.
• 3D Preview: With this advanced feature, customers can view a detailed and realistic 3D version of their gift to ensure it looks exactly like they want it to before placing the order.
• Mobile App for Product Personalization: Customers can personalize their gifts using their smartphones. This flexibility of personalizing gifts anytime and anywhere enhances convenience and promotes impulse buying.

Benefits of using the product designer tool:

• Customers can show their creativity and design products on their own
• Easy navigation and appealing UI/UX make it easy to create designs and use tool more efficiently
• The tool incorporates feature-rich library with multiple font types, images, clip arts, object handling, and more for easy design customization
• Design a range of products like t-shirts, gifts, mugs, cushion covers, mobile back covers, pin buttons, and more.
• It is compatible with all the major eCommerce platforms and multi-language websites

2. 3D Configurator

The 3D Configurator gives a 360-degree configuration approach. You can configure various products like apparel, jewelry, shoes, auto parts, watches, etc. The 3D configurator lets your customer perform customization on any part of the product. It lets you try different styles, textures, and colors on different parts of the product. As you keep customizing, the live preview shows how the product will look.

Some of the remarkable features of the 3D configurator are:

• Photorealistic Visuals: The 3D model looks really close to the real product, giving customers a clear idea of what they’re creating and how the final outcome will look.
• Interactivity: Customers can easily rotate, zoom in and out, and make changes to the 3D model, all in real-time.
• Material and Texture Simulation: The tool showcases how different materials, such as metal, fabric, wood, etc., will look. For a realistic preview, customers can also try out different finishes, like matte or textured, and select the one they like the most.
• Customizable Elements: Customers should be able to easily add and change elements like text, images, colors, patterns, and fonts on the 3D model, with all changes displayed in real time.

Benefits of 3D Product Configurator for Your Customers

• Provides a real-time 360° 3D product view
• An engaging platform for customers
• Builds customers trust
• Enables price transparency

A Customer Success Story

Trend Setters Ltd. is a USA-based company. Their website – Custom Photo Prints, offers a range of gift products like mugs, photo frames, wall arts, and home decor products. They partnered with PrintXpand to offer customization on your store.

Click here to read the full case study and understand how our ready-to-launch web-to-print store can help take your business online.

How Providing an Online eStore Will Help Your Business to Grow

Having an eStore for your personalized gift business is essential. This will let your customers know about your brand and get exclusive insights about your products. Additionally, you can know details about your loyal customers, their needs, feedback, and more.

Let’s see some of the major reasons for having your own eStore for your personalized gift business:

1) Brand building

This is one of the major benefits of having your own website. Customers and your market will be aware of your brand. This in turn, helps your custom gifts business flourish, make more connections, better marketing, and branding of your services.

2) Avoid price war

Personalized gift offerings help you to reach customers better. Moreover, you will have full authority to decide prices of your products, delivery charges, shipping charges for both national and international, and if any additional charges are needed.

3) Complete business autonomy

This will give you more freedom to set your own rules for your personalized gift business and other services you provide. Rather than following other marketplaces’ rules and regulations, having this option is better.

4) Faster and better customer service

Providing better customer service is very important. Many third party platforms will help you with services but in many cases, it is not up to the mark. This is when setting up your own personalized gift business eStore using effective third party services for customer service is better. This will provide faster and better services to your customers.

5) Better customer loyalty and retention

Your customized gifts business eStore will not only give you a better reach but will also help you in knowing your customer loyalty and retention. To make your business popular it is important to have a loyal customer base, and having an eStore will help.

Using different marketing tools, you can inform your customers about new products or services. Apart from this, you can also introduce new loyalty programs like discounts on products, free delivery, some vouchers on shopping above mentioned limit, etc.

This will help you to have loyal customers and better customer service will help you to retain customers.

Related Resource: How to Build Customer Loyalty

 
6) Services available round the clock

Physical location comes with restricted areas of services and business working hours. But, taking your personalized gift business online will be devoid of all these issues. You can provide customer services around the clock. They can place orders anytime from anywhere. Additionally, having international customers will give your business more exposure.

Select the Right Gift design tool

There are multiple tools available to create different designs for your mugs. But, there are some basic features that these tools need. Let’s see some of them in brief:

1) Multilingual Support

Having a tool which supports a multi-language website is important. You need to make sure that your tool supports multiple languages. This will help your personalized gift business to stand out of the crowd and have an international customer base.

2) Feature rich library

Make sure the tool has a thousand-plus font types, a variety of images, clip art support, object handling, and more. This will let your customers give more ideas and support to create an array of designs. Additionally, you can even make sure to have a better customer experience.

3) Compatibility with eCommerce platforms

Your website can be made using any programming language. This is one of the major reasons why you need to have your tool which integrates with any platform.

4) Support thousand plus products

Being a custom gifts business owner, you will have to give your customers multiple products to design. Thus, you have to make sure that your product design tool can provide multiple products to your customers. This will eventually lead to better customer service and satisfaction.

5) AI-powered Text

Pick a tool that lets your users easily use advanced AI-enabled features to write personalized text on the design. Additionally, the tool should have other advanced functionalities enabling users to add effects and place orders on the go.

6) Multiple Design Areas

When selecting the right product design tool, ensure that your customers can create designs for different sides of the product, such as the front or back. You can define the designable areas from the backend.

7) Image Options and Effects

Ensure that the tool lets your customers use image filters, adjustments, and various other effects to enhance the gift designs and make them more appealing.

8) Vector Output with CMYK

Make sure that the product design tool that you integrate saves the gift designs as vector files using CMYK color settings. This setting will ensure that all the images are in high-quality format and ready for high-quality printing.

9) 3D Preview

Today most of the things have gone online and this is when you provide your customers with the feel of offline shopping. 3D preview makes the job easy. Once the design is ready, your customers should be able to preview it in 3D view. This will provide customers with better judgment about their product design, look, and feel.

The gift designer tool is the perfect solution you need to take your gift business to the next level. Ensure that the tool comes with all the features that we talked about and makes customization easy for your customers. Additionally, its backend functionality ensures you get complete control over the tool. Get a personalized demo now.

Select Product Supplier

Once you are done with setting up your eStore, the next step is connecting with suppliers. You will be providing an array of products to your customers. This is when you will need the right supplier that fulfills your needs.

Reach out to various suppliers in your area and negotiate a deal with them about different products. Simultaneously,know your customers’ needs and get product deals accordingly. Meeting suppliers will help you have a better supply of products.

Selecting Printing Methods

There are various printing methods available. Majorly 3 types of those methods are used for printing services. Moreover, the type of products you use also influences your printing method. Below are some of the common printing methods:

1) Screen printing

This type of printing is most commonly used while printing t-shirts and taking bulk orders. The benefit is that its prints last longer and provide consistent printing. However, it takes a bit more time to print.

2) Digital Photo Mug Printing

It is a process that prints an image or design directly onto a specially coated paper. It offers a full-color and permanent artwork look, it is an excellent method to print images or text in high quality, let’s say for mugs.

3) Embroidered printing

This is the oldest printing method It uses sewing machines for designing. People prefer this type of printing as it looks original, regal, and there are very less chances of design coming out.

You can also reach out to other printing vendors, tie up business deals with them, and send them printing orders. This will require less investment, give some share to vendors, and also make your customers happy. Reach out to various known vendors in your proximity, ask them certain questions like:

• Which printing methods do they have?
• Can they print designs on products you provide?
• What will be their cost per product and design?

Lastly, if things go well for you and your customized gifts business, then you can sign a business agreement with them. Hence, on the basis of your budget decide which method is suitable for you and move forward with it.

Marketing Strategies

Marketing strategies play a vital role in any business. Once you are done with creating an eStore for your personalized gift business, providing a wide range of products and services, integrating product designer tools, etc., comes implementing marketing tactics. It is important to market your business via different channels.

There are many methods to market your customized gifts business and make it reach a wider audience. Some of them are: PPC, SEO, influencer marketing, collaborating with brands, partnering with other popular eStores, social media marketing, and more. Each of them has their merits and drawbacks.

If you are looking to rank your website on Google, then you can go forward with either PPC or SEO strategies. Go with PPC if looking for instant results and ranking or SEO for 6 to 8 months of duration.

Influencer marketing is a new way to promote your business. You can reach out to various social media influencers and negotiate a promotional deal with them. They have a huge impact if your target audience is GenZ and millennials.

Apart from this, you can start social media marketing and reach a wider audience. Lastly, collaborate with other popular eStores, upload your product images, and increase your sales.

Ready to build an online gift store? See how your Web to Print Solution with a ready store, and customization tool can help you make profits!

Over to you

Starting your own personalized gift business can be difficult. But, following the above discussed steps will be helpful. Additionally, seeking help from experienced IT businesses will ease the process.

PrintXpand has served businesses like yours for over a decade and have helped them make a remarkable impact with personalized offerings. Stepping up in starting a personalized gift business is certainly a great idea, but you need the right tools to succeed.

The Product Designer tool is our flagship product available with major features to ease the process of customization for end users. Additionally, our other web-to-print solutions, like inventory manager, print job manager, and print ERP, enables businesses to streamline their daily operations. To take your gift business online with a personalization tool, get in touch with us and take a demo to see for yourself how the tool works.

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