Beyond the Bouquet: Why Trust Is Becoming the New Currency of Gifting

Zuvees believes the future of gifting won’t be won through bigger catalogues or deeper discounts. It will be won by solving one of e-commerce’s oldest problems: the gap between what customers expect and what they actually receive.

Few categories in e-commerce are as emotional or as unforgiving as gifting. Buy a pair of shoes that doesn’t fit, and you can return it. Order the wrong phone case and you can replace it. But a gift is different. It arrives once, at a specific moment, carrying someone else’s emotions. If it disappoints, there are no second chances.

Yet despite e-commerce transforming nearly every consumer category, gifting has remained surprisingly unchanged. Customers still browse static catalogues, hope the product resembles the photograph, and wait anxiously until someone on the other side confirms that everything arrived as expected.

For Vijay Ghadge and Abhishek Daiya, that trust gap wasn’t simply an operational issue. It was an opportunity to rethink the category itself.

The two founders, who previously worked together at Ola, launched Dubai-based Zuvees in early 2025 with a simple premise: people aren’t buying flowers or hampers. They’re buying confidence that an emotion will arrive exactly as intended.

“When someone sends a gift, they are not purchasing flowers, chocolates or a hamper. They are purchasing an emotion,” says Ghadge. “The biggest challenge in gifting today is expectation mismatch. What the sender imagines, what the platform promises and what the recipient ultimately receives are often three very different things.”

That philosophy has resonated quickly.

Within little over a year of launch, Zuvees has crossed an annualised revenue run rate of more than USD 3 million, serves customers from over 50 countries and recently secured fresh funding from IvyCap Ventures, taking its total capital raised to AED 12 million as part of its ongoing Series A round.

But the founders insist they are not building another online gifting company.

They are trying to build what they call Gifting 3.0.

An Industry Built on Hope

Ghadge entered the category after leading the UAE business for Ferns N Petals, where he spent over two years understanding both the scale and the shortcomings of the industry.

“I realised a few things were broken,” he says. “Consumer behaviour was shifting, but the industry wasn’t evolving with it. We felt the problems could be solved differently.”

One shift stood out above everything else.

Consumers were no longer planning celebrations days.

They wanted to celebrate immediately.

“People have moved from ‘gift tomorrow’ to ‘gift today’ and increasingly to ‘gift now’,” says Ghadge. “That changes everything. When customers expect speed and precision together, the entire operating model has to change.”

The opportunity is significant. The UAE gifting market alone is estimated at between USD 1.5 billion and USD 2.2 billion annually, while the broader GCC represents a market worth more than USD 10 billion. Yet much of the industry continues to operate on traditional fulfilment models, fragmented supplier networks and inconsistent customer experiences.

For Ghadge, those structural issues become most visible after the customer clicks ‘Buy’.

“Whenever I ordered gifts online, especially across borders, I could never stop worrying until I saw what had actually been delivered,” he says. “That’s not how gifting should feel.”

Designing Trust Into the Journey

Rather than treating trust as a customer service function, Zuvees has attempted to build it directly into the purchase journey. Every gift is photographed and recorded before dispatch. Customers receive a video showing exactly what will be delivered before it leaves the fulfilment centre.

If it doesn’t meet expectations, it is remade. “Our promise is simple: what you see is what you get,” says Ghadge. “If customers don’t like what they see, we’ll redo it. If necessary, we’ll do it again.”

Interestingly, customers rarely describe the feature as quality control. They describe it as involvement.

“The feedback we hear most often is that people feel engaged,” he says. “For someone sending a gift from another country, that’s probably the closest they can come to physically seeing or touching it.”

The company says it has served nearly 15,000 customers while issuing only a single refund, a metric Ghadge sees as evidence that reducing uncertainty creates stronger customer relationships than simply expanding product choice.

Where AI Meets Emotion

If Ghadge’s focus is on understanding customer behaviour, Daiya’s role is translating that understanding into technology. As Co-Founder, Chief Product Officer and CFO, he leads product development, AI, finance and the company’s technology roadmap.

“Every gifting platform today shows you the same thing: a wall of products sorted by price,” says Daiya. “But nobody walks into a store and says ‘show me everything between 200 and 400 dirhams.’ They say ‘it’s my mother’s birthday, she loves lilies, and I’m not there this year.’ That sentence contains everything you need to get the gift right – the relationship, the occasion, the emotion, the distance. Catalogues can’t read it. Intelligence can. That’s the layer we’re building.”

Together, the founders see artificial intelligence less as an automation tool and more as an intelligence layer sitting behind every customer interaction. Today, AI already helps Zuvees complete unfinished orders, resolve address issues, personalise conversations and improve fulfilment accuracy.

The next step is building what the company calls an AI-powered Gift Advisor. Rather than simply recommending products from its own catalogue, the system is designed to understand relationships, occasions, budgets and recipient preferences before suggesting the most appropriate gift.

“The Gift Advisor isn’t a chatbot bolted onto a store. It’s built on data we generate ourselves – who people gift, on which occasions, what worked, what they came back for,” says Daiya. “Over time, the platform starts remembering the moments that matter in your life: your parents’ anniversary, your friend’s new home, your daughter’s graduation. The goal is that Zuvees reminds you before you remember, and already knows what would land well. That kind of intelligence can’t be copied by adding more SKUs.”

The ambition is to shift gifting away from catalogue browsing and towards guided decision-making.

Building Before Broadcasting

Despite its recent funding announcement, Zuvees has spent much of its first year operating quietly. That, says Ghadge, was intentional. “We’ve always believed in building first and talking later. We wanted customers to experience the product before we started telling people about it.”

Only recently has the company begun investing in broader brand-building initiatives, including radio campaigns and sponsorships. Its long-term ambition, however, extends beyond digital marketing.

The company is exploring branded vending machines for airports and lifestyle destinations, not primarily to drive sales but to increase visibility during impulse gifting occasions. “Those machines are really about awareness,” says Ghadge. “They help people remember the brand at exactly the moment they’re thinking about buying a gift.”

Two Founders, One Blueprint

While Ghadge leads commercial strategy, marketing and customer growth, Daiya oversees the technology, product and financial architecture that powers the business.

The division wasn’t accidental.

Before incorporating the company, the founders completed what startup accelerators often refer to as a co-founder compatibility exercise, independently documenting their ambitions, expectations and working styles before deciding to build a business together.

“We wanted to be sure we were building this for the same reasons,” says Ghadge. “Our skills overlap enough to understand each other, but they’re complementary enough to build together.”

“Vijay has spent years understanding how this category actually behaves on the ground – the customer, the supply chain, the last mile. I come from product and technology. When he describes a problem, I can usually see the system that solves it, and when I propose something, he can immediately tell me whether a customer will care,” says Daiya. “That shorthand is why we move fast. We argue about the how, rarely about the why.”

Looking Beyond the UAE

Fresh capital will now be directed towards expanding technology capabilities, strengthening AI, scaling operations and entering new markets.

Saudi Arabia and Qatar remain the immediate priorities, while the company also continues exploring opportunities outside the GCC.

For the founders, however, geography is secondary.

Their larger ambition is to redefine what customers expect from gifting itself.

“The future belongs to platforms that combine trust, personalisation and speed,” says Ghadge. “That’s what we’re building.”

“Gifting 1.0 was the local florist. Gifting 2.0 put catalogues online. Gifting 3.0 rests on three things: curation, precision and speed,” says Daiya.“Curation means you shouldn’t have to scroll through a thousand products to find the one that’s right. Precision means what arrives is exactly what was promised – down to the video you approve before it ships. And speed means the gift reaches in an hour, same day or your chosen slot, not before, not after the event. Individually, none of these is new. Doing all three together, at scale, – that’s the hard part, and that’s exactly why we’re building it,” he adds.

If e-commerce spent the past decade solving convenience, Zuvees is betting that the next decade will be about solving confidence.

Because in gifting, products may be delivered in minutes.

Trust still takes years to earn.