There are many opportune moments during the year to express your love and affection towards people in your social, office and friend circles however, how many occasions have you grabbed to show the same to your online connections ? (naturally not considering people whom you already know )… yes they are still ‘connections’ until you acknowledge affection or love and other emotions towards them. With the proliferation of online tools and platforms, the online community circle of people has also increased. To loosely define, connections with whom your relationship is purely on the tool or platform. It started there and remains like that. Some chats, likes, emojis, comments here and there. Nothing beyond that.
Valentine’s Day is an apt moment, to express and manifest the online relationship and take it to the next level. Gifting can be the way to show that your mindspace also has a small real estate for them. But online relationships has a trust factor involved and sending a gift requires a physical address to be shared, which people would be hesitant to share. Dead end. No. There is a platform available, which can allow you generate a virtual postal address and invite your connections to send you gifts.
Hide n Gift generates a six digit virtual postal address after having entered your physical address. Then, it creates a link, which can be posted on social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. The people who would like to send the gift to you can click on the link and select from the gift shop that opens up and send the gift. The payment can be done online and the gift gets delivered through courier. The parcel will only have the name of the sender without any information whatsoever. Even the courier company has no information about the sender.
There are a host of options available to express your love. From a thirty rupee kit-kat to an expensive gift-pack. “To start with, we have a gift list of small ticket size items – chocolates, gift packs, etc but we expect the volumes to be higher. Valentine’s Day is one such opportunity for people to express their love,” says Anand Muthiah, Founder, Hide N Gift.
The registrations and volumes have shot up in the last couple of days because of Valentine’s Day. In an interesting instance of people showing their gratitude towards old age citizens. A junior colleague gifted his senior colleague with a fruit and nut chocolate and she got elated and shared it as a testimonial. Small moments of love.
Anonymous gifting is a new space. There are many options available to gift known people but there are hardly any avenues to gift online associations. Amazon Wishlist being one exception, where people who want to receive gifts can select the products and Amazon will package them in a link, which can be posted on social media platforms by the wishlist creator. People who are interested in gifting will buy those gifts from Amazon and send it to the person.
So when you send gifts to your ‘connections’, they are no longer connections but ‘associations’.