French Insider Podcast Ep. 40
Bringing “Experience Gifting” to the U.S.: The Story of Giftory with COO and Founding Team Member, Agathe Benoit
Thank you for downloading this transcript.
Listen to the podcast released July 15, 2025 here: https://www.sheppard.com/multimedia-642
In this episode of French Insider, Agathe Benoit, Chief Operating Officer and founding team member of Giftory, joins Sheppard Mullin attorneys Karl Buhler and Inès Briand to discuss the company’s business model and the challenges of launching the “experience gifting” concept in the United States.
About Agathe Benoit
Before co-founding Giftory, Agathe Benoit served as Head of Seller Operations at Back Market, the global leader in refurbished technology. There, she led a team of 20, overseeing critical areas such as sales, seller engagement, support, communications, and partnerships. Her leadership was instrumental in strengthening seller relations and achieving operational success. Previously, she spent six years as a Senior Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company, advising clients on complex business challenges and strategic initiatives across multiple industries.
Earlier in her career, Agathe served as Product/Marketing Manager at OMB Labs, Teaching Assistant at Columbia University, Part-time Consultant at PRODIGY NETWORK, and Visiting Student Researcher at the University of California. She also volunteered at ASS INDE ESPOIR.
Agathe was educated at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, specializing in Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science, before earning an International Baccalaureate from the Centre International de Valbonne. She later attended École Polytechnique, where she earned an Engineering degree in Applied Mathematics. In 2012, she completed a Master of Science in Management Science and Engineering at Columbia University, in collaboration with Columbia Business School.
About Karl Buhler
As an associate with the Corporate and Securities Practice Group and French Desk in Sheppard Mullin’s New York Office, Karl Buhler focuses on domestic and cross-border transactions, including mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, and complex commercial agreements in industries such as technology, communications, life sciences, energy, defense and aerospace. In particular, he advises foreign companies with the installation and development of their operations in the United States.
Born and educated in France, Karl began his legal career in China, practicing corporate law in both Beijing and Hong Kong, with a focus on mergers, acquisitions, and project finance in the energy and infrastructure sectors. He then relocated to Paris, where he continued to focus on corporate transactions, but also expanded his expertise to international arbitrations and litigations arising from contracts and transactions, including mergers and acquisitions, joint venture, and infrastructure agreements.
Karl moved to New York to further build his corporate experience in cross-border transactions and disputes at a U.S.-based firm, where he worked closely with French companies implanted in the United States.
About Inès Briand
Inès Briand is an associate in Sheppard Mullin’s Corporate Practice Group and French Desk Team in the firm’s Brussels office, where her practice primarily focuses on domestic and cross-border mergers and acquisition transactions (with special emphasis on operations involving French companies). She also has significant experience in general corporate matters and compliance for foreign companies settled in the United States.
As a member of the firm’s French Desk, Inès has advised companies and private equity funds in both the United States and Europe on mergers, acquisitions, commercial contracts and general corporate matters, including expansion of French companies in the United States.
Transcript:
Inès Briand:
Hello, and thank you for joining us on today's episode of Sheppard Mullin's French Insider Podcast. I am Inès Briand, an associate in our New York office. I have a co-host today, Karl Buhler.
Karl Buhler:
Hi, everyone. My name is Karl Buhler. I'm an associate in the New York office of Sheppard Mullin. Today we welcome Agathe Benoit from Giftory.
Hi, Agathe.
Agathe Benoit:
Hi, Karl, hi, Ines. Very nice to be here today.
Inès Briand:
Thanks for joining us.
Karl Buhler:
Yes, thank you very much. Agathe, tell us a little bit about yourself first.
Agathe Benoit:
Yes, I'm happy to. My name is Agathe Benoit. I was born and raised in the southeast of France, but I've been living in New York for the past decade or so. Professionally, started my career in consulting for the first chunk of my career. And then in the recent past, I've moved to working in tech scale-ups and startups, and more recently started two years ago, a company called Giftory.
Inès Briand:
Tell us a bit more about Giftory.
Agathe Benoit:
I'm very happy to. Giftory is a gift-giving platform for experiences. Think if you want to buy a gift that's not a physical item, but an experience like a spa, or a cooking class, or a Michelin dining restaurant, a hot air balloon, anything you might want to gift to someone that's experience-based or an activity. You go on our website, you can filter by location, by category, find what you want. And then send it to them with a little personalized note.
Inès Briand:
Okay. You were talking about location. Are you available everywhere or is it located in specific cities in the US?
Agathe Benoit:
Yes, exactly. US is the keyword. We're only in the US right now, but we're actually quite widespread. Today we're in 40 different states and we have about 4000 experiences that are live on the website. We put new experiences live every week, so that 4000 number just keeps increasing.
Karl Buhler:
All the experiences are in the US, or can you have experiences in different countries?
Agathe Benoit:
US only for now, yeah. We started as a B2C, so for customers only and we started digitally, which is something that's interesting to know. But over the past two years, we've launched both a physical gift that I've brought to you today.
Inès Briand:
Yeah, which is very nice.
Agathe Benoit:
Thank you so much. We're also expanded in the B2B category.
Inès Briand:
Yeah, you do corporate gifting right?
Agathe Benoit:
Correct, yes. That's the corporate gifting, B2B category, it's the same thing for us. What happened is in the past year-plus, we've had a bunch of HR people, or sales teams, or lawyers as you know, who've reached out to us and been interested in using Giftory experiences as gifts for their employees or for their clients, their VIP clients, to be able to give a gift that's a bit more thoughtful than what they were doing in the past. Think the bottle of champagne or the chocolates that you used to give to your clients, now gifting a-
Inès Briand:
A helicopter ride.
Agathe Benoit:
Exactly. Or a sailing tour around Manhattan is more enjoyable and people enjoy it.
Inès Briand:
Some of our listeners may be familiar with this, that this concept already existed in Europe, but didn't seem to be very present in the US. How did you bring it? What challenges did you face? Was it hard?
Agathe Benoit:
Yeah, that's a great point. To give a few numbers. Right now in the US, the experience gift platform industry, so if you take all the different players that are in the US operational in the same field, it's about 100 million in sales on a yearly basis. If you take Europe, it's more around 1.5 billion. We know the US market is much bigger, we know there's a gift market, so there is an opportunity.
The reason why it's so small is because instead of going through gift-giving platforms like Giftory, people have been going through other ways. Today, if you take the whole experience gift category in the US, it's about maybe 90 billion overall, and the industry is quite fragmented, and people go directly to the experience provider. If you want to buy your friend a helicopter ride, you might go buy a gift card to the experience provider. With Giftory, we're offering the possibility to have more options, one place to find ideas, and a better way to gift with personalized message, with boxes, with the gifting moment. And also, flexibility to exchange towards other categories.
I don't know if I've fully answered your question, but that gives you, first of all, the experience gift market and how it's structured. Your question around, yes, it's big in Europe and not as big in the US right now. It's definitely been a challenge because it's a concept that needs education basically. That's in progress, but it's been a fun journey. Once we know the industry and the need is there because gifting is there, people love experiences as gifts. The question is how we package it, in what format do we offer it, what kind of categories should we go into, and then how we sell it, the whole go-to-market strategy is the main challenge and what we've been tackling the past couple of years.
Karl Buhler:
How did you start the business? Since it's like a blank sheet of paper here in the US, how did you first reach out to first providers, and then customers?
Agathe Benoit:
Yes, that's exactly it. It started with a blank sheet of paper. Well, because we're in the digital world, it was more a blank notion and a blank database, so we started from there. Luckily, we had funding from the start so we were able to recruit very skilled team members. We started by doing two things at once. On one end, our product team building the tools, building the database, making it live. From starting early gen working on the project in 2023 to be precise, up to April which is the date at which we launched our platform and had our first sale, the product team, tech team was developing a website because the tools needs to be showing what we have and need to have a way to send that message to a recipient who then takes care of booking their experience. That was on one side.
Then from the business side, what happened is we had of course neither clients nor experiences, so we had to start from somewhere. We started reaching out to experience providers. The way we work is we partner with a two-person business helicopter provider, or a cooking class that has cooking classes available all across the country, or the local spa, or any other business, we go talk to them and we negotiate a commission. Once they agree to give us a commission in exchange of us sending them people, we put them live on our platform, write all the content, the imagery, everything else. Then we put it live, available for people to purchase as gifts.
Some of the first partners we reached out, literally driving an hour-and-a-half outside of Washington, DC to talk to the person who was operating hot air balloons, I had no clue how hot air balloons were working. By the end of that Starbucks coffee, I knew quite a bit about hot air balloons and the person was happy to work with us. We were bringing him business, making it easy for him to have more customers, so he was very willing to work with us. That was one of the first ones. Now we have about 500 partners live on the platform.
Karl Buhler:
In terms of customers, are they US customers or foreigners living in the US?
Agathe Benoit:
Oh, that's a great question. We actually do not have that data. Right now, we find our customers based on what they're interested in, what they're searching on Google if they're searching for gifts, they find us on Amazon or on wedding registries which we're available on, but we do not know where their origins are. Yeah, where they're from.
It's actually the concept isn't well known in the US. Actually, we do have a competitor called Virgin Experience Gifts, who used to be called Cloud Nine, and who's been around for about 20 years. They've been educating, them and other competitors, they've been educating the market, but we usually need to educate people a little bit around how it works. The fact that we have 4000 experiences they can choose from. Sometimes there's also, some of our products, which are multi-choice experiences. I might give you a Taste of New York experience and within that collection, you can choose anything in New York that's centered around food. If I don't know you that well, but I know you like to try new things food-wise, I might gift that to you.
But yes, people are understanding how it works, are usually liking the concept because the platform helps both to find something that they haven't necessarily thought of before, and also send it in an easy way.
Karl Buhler:
The concept of gifting in the US is so well known. You go to Target, you got to Duane Reade, by the cashier area, those racks full of credit, gift cards, to Starbucks, and Five Guys, McDonald's.
Agathe Benoit:
Yeah.
Karl Buhler:
In essence, you're saying that this concept was not that well known in structure before because they're aware of it. They know the concept of gift. Very interesting.
Agathe Benoit:
The gift card market is huge and of course, mainstream in any way. Actually, we "compete" with gift cards in the sense that typically businesses, when they reach out to us, they want something different because giving a gift card is like giving cash. I know you go to Starbucks, I know you use Amazon, I know you like maybe this brand of apparel or anything, I might give you that gift card. But in a sense, I'm just giving you cash. If I'm giving you an experience, I've listened to you, I thought about ... It's more personal. It's more thoughtful.
Also, that's one of the, before starting Giftory, we did do some customer surveys to understand what was important to people in terms of gifting. What came out is really how memorable the gift is. With gifting experiences, what's very interesting is there's two memorable moments. Because there's the moment when you're gifting the gift, you're giving that box hand-in-hand and saying, "Happy birthday. I recognize you, I appreciate you." That person comes back to you with a smile, with a thank you. That's memorable. But then with the experience gift, you have a second memorable moment which is the day you're going to go enjoy your experience. You're going to go enjoy your Michelin dining restaurant and I hope you're going to send me a picture. That's how it brings you so much strengthening of relationships, both for customers and for businesses.
Karl Buhler:
I like also the size of the box because the gift card, it's like a credit card, an actual box. What do you have in the box?
Agathe Benoit:
Yes, of course. Inside the box, I'm opening it right now, you have a little envelope that says "Giftory, every gift tells a story." Inside, you have your experience voucher. Whatever you're buying, it will have the name of the experience, and then a little personalized message that you can add directly on the website, and then explanations of how to use your gift.
Karl Buhler:
You had a gift experience ...
Inès Briand:
A present.
Agathe Benoit:
Yeah, people love it. I went to conferences, as I was telling you, for the past couple of weeks, talking to HR folks mainly buying gifts for their teams, employees. Everyone whose seeing the box has little sparkles in their eyes. So very happy to have launched it only a couple months before the holiday season last year. That was a fun improvement for the company.
Inès Briand:
Talking about HR, how did you build a team here? Because as you said, this concept was maybe more prominent in Europe, so then you arrive in the US, you're building your business. Was it hard to recruit people, to educate them on the concept? Is your team mostly American, mostly international? How does it work for you?
Agathe Benoit:
Yeah, great question. Today our team, to give you a couple of numbers, is a little bit less than 30 people. We're all around the globe.
Inès Briand:
Okay.
Agathe Benoit:
It's my message. We have teams in Asia, in Europe, in the US. We've been, as I was saying, lucky to be able to hire very quickly from the start. We've been working mainly with either recruiting people we had worked with before in the past or referrals. One of the things also that made us strong from the beginning is being able to hire people who have been in this industry for a while. Our marketing team is mainly based in the UK and a bunch of them have worked for Buyagift, which is an equivalent in the UK, a similar company. They came in with that expertise. Our sales team whose responsible for acquiring new experience providers, they have, most of them, experience at Virgin Experience Gifts, which is one of our main competitors here.
Yeah. To your question on how we were able to hire them, it's from previous companies or from referrals, and then it just grows naturally.
Inès Briand:
Your team is all around the globe, but are you planning on expanding to other countries, or are you right now in the US?
Agathe Benoit:
Yeah, not right now. The US is a big market. We did buy the giftory.ca for the day we want to expand to Canada, but that's the only step we've taken. The country is huge, so right now even just 40 states, but even in the markets where we are, there is still space to add on new categories, new experiences. At this stage, the US market is big enough for us to focus on it for now.
Karl Buhler:
Do you have an experience across every single state? Do you offer restaurants, for instance, across all of those states, or it depends on the location?
Agathe Benoit:
Yeah, great question. That's actually a discussion, decision making that we've been having from the start. The question was should we start by focusing on specific cities, or should we start by working cooking classes, and then offer cooking classes all across the country? The approach that we took, initially we thought that we would focus on specific cities. But as we made progress in signing new experience partners, we signed partners who had operations all across the country. It made sense to start putting this content live, so putting these experiences live on our website.
But it's always a game of balance because we want for a customer, like you for example based in New York City, if you're buying a gift for someone who lives in the city, you want to have a lot of options. Having hundreds of cities with only two experiences doesn't keep customers. First, help them decide. If there's only two options, they might just drop and leave the website. Or also, even come back because you want the cities to be robust enough in terms of offers so that they continue to find gifts that they want to buy for people around them.
The answer is no right now. We have some cities like New York, like LA where we've developed a wide range of offer. But we have others where we know we still have a bunch of gaps. Boston is one that we mentioned recently, we just don't have as much offer as in other big cities. But generally speaking, we have a good bunch of things already in the main cities in the US.
Karl Buhler:
You first were telling us that you were the one reaching out to those providers at the very beginning of your journey. Are you now in a position where those providers are reaching out to you because they want to be listed on your website?
Agathe Benoit:
Definitely, definitely. Yeah. Some weeks, we have multiple or even multiple in a day and we're like, "Oh, that's a good sign." But there's still two sides. Some small businesses see our website, see us list their competitors or just like what they're seeing on our website, so they're going to reach out and want to sign up. We're still going to, of course, need to do a big sales journey before we sign some of the bigger experience providers. But yeah, we've been having some very fun experiences all across the country, of a sailing cruise in a specific city reaching out, or some creative experiences. Yeah, we get a bunch every week. It's fun to see that it's starting to be easier, from having a brand name that's, I don't know if known is the right term, but at least easier to find than when we just started.
Karl Buhler:
Are you filtering out the people that you want to work with?
Agathe Benoit:
Oh, definitely. Yeah, definitely. We're filtering out in multiple ways. One is we want to make sure the experience is "good." What does that mean? It's an offer that seems desirable, the price point is reasonable, and that's good for a gift. Those are what we're going to look at. We also want to make sure the partner that we're partner with of course has good customer reviews, our customers are going to be taken care of. Because otherwise, we don't want to start partnering with a brand where customers aren't satisfied to go do that experience. Then we also want to be able to tap into brands that will grow with us.
Initially when we started, some of the things we were doing is partnering with local chefs who would do a chef at home experience, which are great experiences if you have team members who have a newborn baby or something. I love to give that experience for new babies. But typically, a one-person business that can only offer experiences once a week or once a month at one point isn't going to work for our brand because we want to be able to scale. We want to be able to find companies, even if they're local businesses, but at least who have the ability to support the offer. Because if we're putting an offer live and 100 people buy it, but only 10 people can do it, it just doesn't work. You need to do 90 refunds. That's one thing we're going to look at.
Then the last thing we look at is very pragmatically speaking, is it easy to book with them? Because we want to make sure that when our customers, if you're giving a gift, the recipient of the gift will book directly through our customer support. We have an in-house customer support team who takes care of everything to make sure the customer experience is the best possible so we want that booking journey to be fluid. It’s automatic, sometimes we have integration with booking platforms that just make it in one click. Other times, our customer support needs to reach out to the experience provider. So we need to make sure that works in a way that's the best experience possible for the person who is booking their experience with us.
Karl Buhler:
Because I remember in Europe, the issue with Smartbox was twofold. Number one, the price point since they were cheaper than the football experience that they were buying directly from the provider, people were saying that the experience was not what they were supposed to be having in Europe. Number two, when they were trying to book, the provider was always trying to upsell them in a way. Is that something that you can see in the US, not with your [inaudible 00:20:35], but is it some of the refrains American customers may have here?
Agathe Benoit:
That's a good question. The first part of your question, actually that makes me think of another comparison we sometimes have with Groupon. Where people will buy an experience that's not the experience the usual customer would have if they went directly to the experience provider, but a cheaper, discounted version of it. We are doing everything to not do this because we want to make sure we keep a brand positioning that is more premium than that. Where, as a customer, you get the best experience and the best service, the same if not better than what you would get if you went directly to the experience provider. We're always going to be listing an experience that's the same that the experience provider would be listing on their own website or channels. In that sense, no, the service you have, the experience you have is very much the same.
It comes also to a topic around pricing. We're also priced at the same list price as the experience provider. Again, we make our money through a commission. From a customer perspective, you have no reason to go directly to the customer because buying a gift through us, you can get the same price. Yeah. We do not have that.
Then your question on upselling. The thing is since contrarily to Smartbox, where you book with the experience provider, you're going to be booking your restaurant or go directly, actually with Giftory, the customer books through our customer support. Right now, we don't do any upsell for people who are using their gifts or redeeming their experience. We do a little bit of upsell for the person who's buying a gift. If you're buying a spa day for someone's birthday, at the end of the final, you're going to be asked, "Do you also want to add a date night to the theater for the local AMC?" That will ask, but like any other customer platform. Who doesn't do that?
But also, the thing is, in full transparency, we are considering it. Because if tomorrow, you get a gift from your employer saying, "Go enjoy this spa day," but you want to take your spouse, well, you would want to pay for a second experience. Either the provider might sell it to you, or Giftory might say, "Wait. Do you want a second ticket? Do you want a second service?" Even for the customer, it could be a good experience. Of course, they can always say no. At this stage, they sometimes just want to buy an extra round on a car circuit, or they want to buy an extra seat, or anything else. Making it easy for them to do so seems like the right thing to do.
Your question is great. Why would people buy through us instead of going directly? The number one thing is, one, it gives them ideas. You want to be a gift, you're not sure what you want, so going on their platform just gets you tons of ideas that you probably wouldn't have thought it before. That's a great way of just deciding what you want. Second is you can give your recipient the option. With some of our collections, I was mentioning it earlier, the Taste of New York experience, where you don't really know what to give your recipient so you might just gift them the option to choose.
Then one of the other advantages is the flexibility because if you're gifting me a helicopter ride above New York, but I've already been on multiple times or I'm scared of heights, I don't want to do it, I will get the option to choose something different. Maybe I just want to go to the spa for a day, and then I'll just switch up to a spa. If you buy a gift card for an experience provider for a helicopter tour in the city, most probably they won't let you get a refund so I will have to go to that specific experience provider. That gives you the flexibility. We're also fully exchangeable, I mentioned it. We also offer 14 days refund. If, for whatever reason, you change your mind or I say, "I really didn't want a gift from you," or for whatever reason you want a refund, you can get that. And also, never expires.
Inès Briand:
Oh, never?
Agathe Benoit:
Never expires.
Inès Briand:
Oh.
Agathe Benoit:
That gives that flexibility. That's the one thing. Then last but not least, sometimes there are glitches, the experience isn't positive enough or there's a last-minute cancellation. If there is a glitch, we're a reassurance for people. Our customer support also being a young company, we'll make sure our customers are 100% satisfied and want to come back to us. If there's an issue with the experience provider, we're usually the mitigator and we will make sure the customer is taken care of. In those rare occasions where the customer support from our experience provider doesn't solve the issue with our customer, we'll step in, and we sometimes take the cost because we want to make sure our customers are highly satisfied and that they'll continue to want to purchase gifts on Giftory.
Inès Briand:
What are your successes so far? What are you the most proud of in your journey to building Giftory?
Agathe Benoit:
Well, thank you for asking. I would say first, we went quite fast in the growth. I think just hiring a robust team, being able to, and it's not me personally, it's truly a team effort, to push website live after a couple of months. To be able to have today 4000 experiences, which is very close to some of our main competitors who've been around for 20 years. Those are all things that we can be proud of as a team. If, again, we compare to some of our competitors, like the Michelin dining restaurant for Michelin stars, that's a partnership that we signed early on with differentiates from our main competitors and which is a good offer to have. Having launched our physical packages, all quite differentiator. Being able to sell now through Amazon, wedding registries are also things that are still growing. It's only the start, but good achievements and good prospects for the future.
Inès Briand:
Oh, that's great. You have a lot to be proud of.
Agathe Benoit:
Thank you. Yeah.
Inès Briand:
Any challenges you've faced in your expansion and building, or anything you wish you had done differently, now reflecting back?
Agathe Benoit:
Yeah. Always is the answer. But challenges and things we're focusing on now, the number one is building a profitable business.
Inès Briand:
Yeah.
Agathe Benoit:
For those who have been following, two years live and growing fast obviously means we've been spending a lot on marketing, a lot on team HR costs, so there is a cost base. Right now, we're very much focused on how we can have a path to profitability, so that's the number one challenge so far. We can compare to our competitors, but they've been around for 20 years, they're making money and we're not. That's number one.
Then there's a lot of other challenges we're looking at. We were talking about categories. Typically, hotels is something we haven't discussed too much, but that is something we're not very big on right now compared to Europe. For the listeners who know the French or the European market, a Smartbox hotel is something that is very mainstream. Here, we have some, we don't sell as much as what we could be selling based on European benchmarks. That would be one.
Another one that can still be tapped into and help us generate growth is the whole social media utilization. We've been doing a little bit of it, but seeing other consumer brands in the US, there's definitely something to do there that we can invest in more.
Then last but not least, one thing that's top of mind for me is the whole corporate gifting part. Which saying right now is a very small part of our business, but in the future we believe it could be huge. That's one thing that I'm personally more focused on these days, which is fun.
Inès Briand:
Yeah, that all interesting. It brings a lot of things into perspective for the future. Do you have any words of advice for our listeners that may wish to start a business in the US?
Agathe Benoit:
Who am I to give advice? I think honestly, we were very lucky in many ways, of having both funding and an idea from investors based in Europe who helped us kick off the business with a good, wide-range of experts that could talk to get the right knowledge at the right time. Definitely things to learn from our experiences.
My only advice is if it's something that you enjoy or you're tempted by, try the entrepreneurship journey in the US, and make sure you do it with the right people. That's the most important to me in any life situation.
Inès Briand:
Yeah.
Agathe Benoit:
At least you're doing it with fun people, making it memorable moments in the business world as well, not only in the gifting and the fun world. Yeah, have fun doing it.
Inès Briand:
If we want to get in touch and contact you, what's the best way to do so?
Agathe Benoit:
You can find my LinkedIn, I assume on the podcast episode directly.
Inès Briand:
Yeah.
Agathe Benoit:
Yeah, just follow me, request a connection. Happy to answer and to connect if you're interested in connecting with me or with Giftory.
Inès Briand:
Thank you very much.
Agathe Benoit:
Thanks to you, thanks for having me. Good conversation. It was fun.
Contact Information:
Resources:
* * *
Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to FOLLOW the show to receive every new episode delivered straight to your podcast player every week.
If you enjoyed this episode, please help us get the word out about this podcast. Rate and Review this show in Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Stitcher, or Spotify. It helps other listeners find this show.
Be sure to connect with us and reach out with any questions/concerns:
This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as legal advice specific to your circumstances. If you need help with any legal matter, be sure to consult with an attorney regarding your specific needs.