Wrapp, the social gifting app that lets you give your Facebook friends free gift cards from popular retailers, just continued its global expansion by activating its service in Norway (Update – February 2023: The startup seems to be no longer in business under this website and we therefore deactivated the link).
Wrapp aims to make it fun and easy to give, receive and redeem gift cards using mobile devices or desktop, and allows Facebook friends to contribute to the presents. The Swedish original was recently ‘cloned’ by the Samwer brothers with their service DropGifts (we just reported on the international roll-out of DropGifts). It’s likely that the competition with the German copycat played a role in Wrapp’s recent expansion strategy. In addition to Sweden, the US, UK and Norway, Wrapp has also announced that it will launch its services in Germany very soon. Wrapp’s iPhone app already supports additional languages like Chinese, Dutch, French, Romanian, Russian and Spanish.
For merchants, Wrapp is a discount-free customer acquisition and retention platform for conducting performance-based campaigns. With Wrapp, retailers use friend-to-friend marketing to drive highly targeted online and in-store sales, and get real-time access to aggregated campaign and customer demographic data.
The startup estimates that to date, some 150,000 consumers have sent more than 1 million gift cards using Wrapp, which can be redeemed in stores operated by over 50 major retailers. Every gift card posted on a recipient’s Facebook timeline or wall is seen by approximately 80% of their friends. Participating merchants report that the sales average at least four to six times the value of the free gift card given using Wrapp.
“With Wrapp, your gift cards are always in your pocket when you’re ready to pick out something you really like,” said founder Winbladh. “Anyone around the world can now use Wrapp to instantly send real gifts to their friends in Norway.”
Wrapp was started last year by Hjalmar Winbladh and a small team of entrepreneurs in Sweden. In 2011, the young company raised $5.5 million in funding from Atomico and Creandum. Earlier this year Wrapp raised another $5 million from Greylock Partners and Atomico.
Find this interesting? To learn more about the Stockholm-based startup, check out the interview we did with founder Winbladh back in November 2011.
