Making Gifting More Meaningful and Sustainable

In 2019, Founder Jane Park was staring at the piles of gift wrap filling her living room post-holidays, wondering what she was going to do with all of it. She was surprised when a quick online search revealed that most gift wrap is not recyclable. 

She remembered how her grandmother in Korea used to wrap gifts in reusable squares of silk. She became passionate about transforming the gifting experience to leverage what is possible today with digital technology - and that’s when the Tokki was born. Translating to “rabbit” in Korean, we make a reusable alternative to traditional gift wrap, one that can “hop” around from friend to friend, spreading joy with every reuse!

Bringing together physical gift bags made with recycled water bottles, along with a proprietary digital QR Card (no app needed) – we believe we can redefine gifting to be both sustainable and memorable. The market for gift wrap and greeting cards was $35 billion in 2020, and we believe that we are one of the only companies offering the innovation that has been lacking for decades. (Source,Source)

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Inventing a new gifting experience takes a lot of thoughtful effort to create both the physical product and digital experience and define how to bring these two together seamlessly for the end user. And to maximize our positive impact, we brought this all together at a price point we believe is on par or lower than the traditional single-use gift wrap + greeting card + tissue alternative - even though we are offering so much more! 

At Tokki, we take pride in our collaborative culture, our obsessive focus on delighting the end user  and our commitment to do better for the planet. Tokki is proudly woman and minority-owned, and we donate 1% of sales to the planet.

Single-use Wrapping Paper & Greeting Cards Are Not Sustainable

Did you know that gift wrap that is sparkly, adorned, color saturated, thin, or coated cannot be recycled? According to our research, most of the gift givers we talk to are shocked to find out that most tissue paper cannot be recycled! Since a lot of gift wrap isn’t recyclable – millions of pounds end up in landfills each year - enough to circle the earth at least nine times (Source). Plus, traditional cards just don’t cut it for us. We want to gift more personally – to see, hear, and engage with the people we love. 

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At Tokki, we’re on a mission to make gifting more meaningful and sustainable with our endlessly reusable QR card and gift bag experience. Users start by scanning the QR code (like a restaurant menu) and we walk them through adding a video, photo, or GIF right from their phone. Tokki makes it easy to create a personalized, unforgettable gift experience in just seconds. For gift recipients, the personalized message pops up immediately (no app or account required) when they scan the QR code.

And this can be repeated endlessly – new personal cards can be uploaded over and over. Every user can log into their free online Tokki account to save all the Tokki cards they have ever given or received. Regift the bag, but hold onto the memory. Users can also track the path of their bag as it is regifted (of course, users also have the option to make their messages private). We are often asked if the next user has to pay to reuse the bag, and the answer is NO! We want the bag to be regifted on and on - that’s why we made the experience so fun! Like the water bottle filling stations at airports that count the number of plastic water bottles eliminated, Tokki’s “gift bag reuse tracker” logs every reuse, gamifying the company’s impact. 

Our gift bags are made from recycled water bottles, specially designed for reuse, and are currently available in 32 beautiful patterns and 3 sizes for every gifting occasion. Birthdays, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas, Hanukkah, graduation - we have prints and sizes to fit every special gifting moment. The Tokki QR Card + Bow (also made with recycled plastic) can be purchased separately - perfect for odd-sized gifts and gift cards. And since we designed the clip to slip over everything from a ribbon to the edge of a mug, we filed a design patent on that too.  

A Large and Growing Gift Wrapping Industry With Little Innovation

The average American gives eight gifts per year, adding up to a Gift Wrap and Greeting Card market size that was valued at $35 Billion in 2020 (Source,Source).

While the industry continues to grow, there is also growing concern around the environmental impact of wrapping paper. In fact, a recent study found that one in three shoppers planned to ditch traditional wrapping paper in 2021 because of its negative impact (Source).

We believe that we are one of the only companies combining physical gift bags with digital QR card technology to reinvent the gifting experience. Other companies focus on just the physical product or the digital card experience, but we believe the true experiential magic happens when these two worlds can be brought together. Our founders, Jane Park and Taylor Hoit, have unique experience in this space because they have succeeded in doing it before. In building Julep Beauty together (one of the first online social beauty brands), they learned how to manage the complexities of a global, physical supply chain alongside the challenges of digital product design. While there are companies selling gift bags made of recycled plastic—we don’t think any of our competition includes QR card technology. And our secret sauce is how it all comes together in the reuse experience. Tokki makes reusing fun, encouraging people to reduce wasteful single-use gift-wrap and card consumption. 

The rave reviews from our early adopters seem to show that Tokki’s use and reuse experiences are delivering more joy and connection.

*The above testimonials may not be representative of the opinions or experiences of other customers and are not a guarantee of future performance or success.

Tokki has also assembled a world-class team of consumer technology and brand executives with strong, direct relationships with relevant national retailers. Our CEO and COO/CTO previously worked for Julep Beauty which was sold at a number of key e-commerce companies in the beauty space including Nordstrom, Sephora, Ulta Beauty and Target. We plan to leverage these past experiences, to assist in our e-commerce sales. Tokki has filed 10 patents and 1 trademark application in five countries plus Europe to protect our unique intellectual property. Since launching in June of 2022, we rolled out to over 260 boutiques across the country and signed up as a vendor with a large publicly-traded retailer in preparation for 2023. (Source)

Join us in Revolutionizing Gifting

At Tokki, we are proud of our innovative spirit and commitment to sustainability, but we also feel that we are offering a strong investment opportunity because of our unique ability to blend digital technology and sustainable physical product management to transform a large market that we believe is ripe for innovation.

What makes Tokki different? Tokki is reinventing gifting: we have 10 patents pending in the United States and four other countries plus Europe to protect the intellectual property we have built in our thoughtful end-to-end user experience. We don’t see any other company bringing this combined digital experience and sustainability focus to this category. And because of our obsessive consumer focus, we ensured that we could deliver an innovative experience at a consumer price point on par (or lower!) than the comparable quality traditional gift bag + card + tissue alternative.

Our outstanding, experienced team: Tokki also stands out amongst startups because of our powerhouse team, who bring a track record of entrepreneurial success as well as direct relationships with executives at key retailers such as Starbucks, Nordstrom, Sephora, Ulta, Anthropologie, Kohl’s Target, Costco, and more (Source). Our CEO/Founder Jane Park has experience founding, growing and exiting a consumer tech company as well as being on-air on QVC. Jane Park has worked with our co-founder and COO Taylor Hoit previously in building an engaging custom digital experience for Julep Beauty’s subscription program. Angie Snyder’s marketing leadership at Nordstrom and Aegis Living has delivered growth and rabid brand loyalty, both of which she is focused on building at Tokki.

More joy, more sustainably: At Tokki, we are on a mission to power more joyful, more sustainable gifting. We are a woman and minority-run business that is committed to doing better every day, strengthening our community and protecting our planet. We hope to inspire gift-givers everywhere to break up with single-use gift wrap and greeting cards, and are committed to donating 1% of our sales for our planet. 

We have a significant opportunity for impact ($35B market) (Source, Source), and outstanding traction in our product development and distribution success.  We are already available nationally in over 260 independent boutiques (Source) and our plans for 2023 already include distribution with an international, publicly-traded retailer. And we’re just at the very beginning! We invite you to join us.