E-commerce and holiday solutions: a platform for building your own wish list. How the Ukrainian startup Rewish works
Reading mode enlarges the text, removes all unnecessary things from the page and allows you to concentrate on the material. Here you can turn it off at any time.
In our recurring Who Are These People segment, Vector offers founders the opportunity to discuss their projects, covering aspects such as their products, marketing strategies, monetisation, investments, and business plans. The focus this time is on Rewish, a Ukrainian startup that provides a platform for building wish lists. Rewish helps e-commerce enterprises enhance their sales by highlighting their offerings within customers’ wish lists.
Editor-in-chief Yuliia Tkach interviewed Zhanna Orlova, Rewish’s CPO and co-founder, about the product’s features, promotion, investments, and plans.
Conception
Rewish has four co-founders:
- Zhanna Orlova, CPO. She has accumulated more than 8 years’ experience in product management, having launched digital products for Kyivstar, Multiplex, and FUIB.
- Vitalii Skladchykov, CEO. He brings more than 10 years’ expertise in software development and leads the company’s Software Development team.
- Yurii Blazhko, CTO. He has 6+ years of experience working as a full stack developer.
- Oleksii Slobodzian, CMO. He has spent over a decade honing his skills in performance marketing.
The story of Rewish started in 2021 when Zhanna overheard a conversation between two women. With the holidays approaching, they shared their concerns about the difficulties of shopping for gifts, noting that they might have to ask their family and friends once again what gifts they wanted. That was when Zhanna realised that she could make the gift selection process more enjoyable and change the culture of how gifts are given and received.
In 2022, Rewish was introduced with the mission «to create a space for honest dialogue about what is significant and to connect people in pursuit of their dreams». Rewish was co-founded by Vitalii Skladchykov and Yurii Blazhko, both technical engineers with experience developing and launching digital products. Oleksii Slobodzian joined the marketing department, enhancing the team’s expertise; he and Zhanna studied together at Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. Later, Oleksii founded his own marketing agency.
There are seven specialists on the team.
Product and audience
Rewish is a platform that allows users to create wish lists to select products from any online store. The process is as follows: store your preferred items in one wish list, share it with your friends or family, and receive the gifts you’ve been hoping for.
Gift givers are provided specific links that allow them to buy items (for example, in the correct size or color) or to reserve them, thereby preventing situations where several individuals purchase the same gift for the same recipient.
Launched in December 2022, the Rewish MVP soon attracted its first 2,000 users, prompting the team to take a break to study real user behaviour and enhance the product. In May 2023, it was officially launched into full-scale production.
Today, Rewish can be accessed online and via mobile app available on iOS and Android. The co-founders indicate that the product has surpassed 270,000 registered users and there have been more than 1,800,000 wishes added. As per internal estimates, products added to Rewish in 2024 were sold for a total of $5,6 million.
«Therefore, we are prioritising the integration of a B2B solution designed to help e-commerce businesses grow their sales by appearing in users’ wish lists. We provide online stores with a fresh channel to drive sales by allowing products to be organically added to users’ wish lists, which encourages further purchases by their friends and other platform users.
We are proposing integrating an “Add to Rewish” widget button for items in online stores. This would simplify the process of adding items to your wish lists, making them visible to the wish list owner’s friends and family, as well as other platform users seeking inspiration and shopping ideas.
Online stores have a unique opportunity to study their audience by tracking which products users prefer and, more importantly, which other items they add. This knowledge allows retailers to adjust their inventory and forge effective collaborations between brands that appeal to common demographics», —explains the co-founder.
Currently, users must manually add product links to their wish lists, and the startup team automatically populates the wish data from e-commerce websites. Zhanna points out that more and more users are turning to e-commerce platforms to streamline the automation of adding items to Rewish.
Zhanna adds: «The market for e-commerce sales enhancement tools is estimated to be at least $100 billion, with our SOM anticipated to be $20 million over the next two years. This is a calculation based on revenue data from Instagram, Google Ads, etc. for 2024, as well as the turnover from other B2B sales tools and those working with “abandoned cart recovery”».
Business model and marketing strategy
As a B2C2B marketplace, Rewish connects consumers who are clear about their product preferences with online retailers in categories such as fashion, beauty, home and decor, books, and accessories. For the time being, Rewish operates mainly in the Ukrainian market. Rewish uses an affiliate marketing-based business model.
The company also adopts a range of strategies to promote its products, which are tailored to the specific audience.
- They began their B2C journey by partnering with select influencers that helped them draw in their initial user base. According to Zhanna, 80% of the product’s registrations are now organic, as people share the platform, their wish lists, and recommend products through social media.
- For their B2B efforts, the company establishes direct communication with e-commerce businesses, which are already listed in their database. Using analytics, the startup team identifies popular online stores and suggests they incorporate Rewish to enhance their sales.
Product promotion is handled by an in-house team. «For example, during B2C promotion, we tested more than 100 different communications, which helped us reduce user acquisition costs from $1,2 to $0,05».
Investments
Rewish was launched using more than $100,000 in the founders’ personal funds. According to Orlova, «We are collaborating with a partner, so we are not seeking external investments at this moment. We are focused on validating our business model, testing scalability hypotheses, and bringing in B2B customers».
Plans
«Right now, we are concentrating primarily on developing our B2B business. We are working to ensure that users can add items from their favourite online stores to Rewish with just one click. E-commerce businesses experienced increased sales when their products were added to users’ wish lists, leading to recommendations among friends, family, and other platform participants.
On a global scale, we envision Rewish as the go-to platform for dreams, desires, plans, and recommendations, helping individuals achieve their wishes and allowing brands to connect with their audience in a non-intrusive manner», summarises the co-founder.
More about this
Helping SMEs streamline lead generation automation. How Ukrainian startup Funely AI was created
Any article can be bookmarked on the site to read later.
Партнерські матеріали
