A family affair
Our gift cards run on the Mastercard rails, but you’re buying from a family company.
We are the story of two best-friends who trained as chartered accountants together, more like brothers, who started small with a big idea 10 years ago.
And here we are today, with a wonderful team behind us, helping you give their perfect gift.
Why did we do it?
The corporate line would be to say is after constantly receiving unwanted gift cards, we realised there was a gap in the market for a spend anywhere gift card. And while this is true, it’s not the reason two chartered accountants and best friends (Thish & Andy) did it.
In truth it was Thish’s idea. He was working in insolvency and each time a retailer went bust, the gift cards they’d already sold became worthless. He didn’t think that was fair, and that’s where it all started.
The big corporate life wasn’t for us
We’d trained together as chartered accountants and became best friends. Now we hit our thirties, with 5 kids between us and counting. Thish is in a director in a NYSE-listed investment bank. Andy’s sales director of a UK consumer business, having previously been their FD. And while we like it, we didn’t love it. Really we’re just wide-boys from South London, and always wanted to run our own thing.
So we quit our jobs, had some awkward conversations with our wives about the loss of good, regular pay checks and off we went. Their Perfect Gift was born as Love From Me, Their Perfect Gift in 2014 with £20,000 in the bank. In October 2015 we raised £150,000 seed investment from friend and family, and we launched our first gift card in March 2016. In October 2016 we raised some more investment, but to date we’ve raised and invested less than £250,000. Yep, we boot-strapped it. We’re accountants, so we know how to look after cash!
We’re not alone
The big thing we’ve always had is the support of some wonderful people. Emily was with us from almost the start, keeping our customers happy. Smit came on board and without him the back-end stuff would have crashed more times than we like to think. And our investors aren’t just investors. They are friends, and they’ve willed us to succeed all along, but not to make a return. Because they wanted to see us bring our dreams to reality.
So this is for them, and all the people over the years that have spent time working with us, putting up with us, and generally watching our backs.
Thank you all, and here’s to the next 10 years of Their Perfect Gift.
Our values
Our Behaviours
- Developing unique products & fantastic people
- Always remaining agile & customer-centric
- Challenging conventional processes & thinking
- Striving to be a leader in innovation within our space
- Obsessively focused on sustainable growth
Our Attitude
- Passionate & innovative
- Customers, Products & People FIRST!
- Adding Value to our community
- Solutions orientated
- To push boundaries to seek better customer solutions.
Our treatment of others
- Always Listening
- Always Delivering
- Living and thriving with Diversity & Equality
- Leading and living our values
- Living and growing responsibly and sustainably
Our honesty and integrity
- Trusting our people and customers
- Leading with reliability and responsibility
- Ensuring the value proposition & pricing is fair
- Acknowledging failures and using their lessons to improve our strengths
- Ensuring our North Star remains positive social impact