Gauri Bhade
Hemangi Varatak (Gifts Galore)
“Corporate gifting has always been a highly commoditized sector. In the conventional gifting space, firms like us need to complete with manufacturers, wholesale dealers, importers, gifting shops, traders and a whole lot of competitors. Price ends up being the only differentiator. We realized that if we were to stand out in the crowd, we need to build some service offerings which are unique. We thought of blue ocean ideas like Gratitude Gifting and Social Gifting and built products around those. We have been successful in creating a market for these unique ideas and in the process ended up creating new business categories. We have many satisfied customers over the last many years for these new offerings too.” deliberates Hemangi, a young, peppy, enterprising founder of Gifts Galore.
Gifts Galore started as a one-stop shop for all the gifting needs of a small to large corporate. It offers a treasure-trove of business gifts and Incentive products like apparels, computer accessories, leather goods, ethnic gifts, stationary items, coasters, mugs etc. Hemangi believes that even the smallest gift has the power to compress the largest amount of words into something very tangible. She, therefore, thoughtfully and appropriately coined their tagline as “Expressions Made Tangible.”
When asked how she forayed into this business, Hemangi revealed “I am a commerce graduate with an MBA in Marketing & HR. I worked with Vodafone and Airtel for eight years where I handled various responsibilities under corporate servicing. On our day of joining, the company gifted us with a ‘cute’ start-up kit – a jute bag containing office stationery and a personalised mug – which proved to be a great motivation for us. The delight I experienced stayed with me for years and somewhere sowed the seed of my business idea. Another reason was the realization that the long working hours one had to put up in the telecom sector would have made me miss out on the major mile stones of my child’s life. The flexibility and the possibility of a better work life balance, as an entrepreneur, beckoned me.”
Sharing more on Gifts Galore’s unique service offerings, she said, “My Genie is a unique Gratitude Gifting initiative by Gifts Galore. It is a powerful, ongoing & continuous PR intervention which helps you stay in touch with your important stakeholders for years. It involves professional management of gifting pertaining to birthdays, anniversaries, special days (Doctors Day, Teachers Day etc) and other similar occasions at an organizational level and is powered by our custom built proprietary software called ‘Nexus Genie’. This is an innovation conceived by us and we are the only firm in Pune (& possibly beyond too) to offer such a service. We have been successfully offering this to a large number of clients for several years now.”
She adds, “Social Gifting is another unique initiative by Gifts Galore which involves combining corporate social responsibility and corporate gifting. It involves end-to-end management of the entire activity from arranging the gifts to arranging the event to hand these over even if it involves travelling to far-off places. We have arranged such gifting initiatives and handing over events in Kanha, Tadoba & Pench wild-life sanctuaries in the presence of senior forest officials. We have also arranged such events in orphanages and old age homes in and around Pune.”
Sharing more on the conventional gifting space, “The competition has grown manifold during the last decade. We however have an edge over many of them due to our dependability, highly professional way of business communication, ability to offer a better choice of options, customised gifts & gift wrapping and timely delivery without breakage. We have serviced over 125 corporate clients to date which includes some of the most marquee names in the corporate world. We have catered to orders from Hyderabad and Mumbai too.”
While delving deeper into Gifts Galore was highly interesting, it was equally interesting to delve deeper to understand the person behind this successful enterprise. Hemangi is a person with varied interest. Hemangi is an avid wild-lifer and an enthusiastic photographer. She has been playing badminton for over a decade and cycles regularly.
She has a strong penchant for contributing to the society. She concludes, “As a wild-lifer, we travel to the remotest forests in India. We are grieved see that the local tourist guides and forest guards walk bare foot. They walk deep into the forests without gum boots, rain coats, caps and in some cases water bottles too. I do my bit to raise funds for them so that we are able to provide these bare essentials to them. Also, along with my hubby’s firm, we regularly contribute to orphanages and old age homes. Doing so is an extremely fulfilling and humbling experience”
www.giftsgalore.in
hemangi.vartak@giftsgalore.in
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