Tigerbow Gives Life to Virtual Gifts
Startup Tigerbow has just made sending gifts much, much easier. Tigerbow allows individuals to send real gifts to one’s virtual identity, (their email address, social network accounts, etc.) instead of having to send it to their physical street address. Talk about practicality…this makes a lot of sense.
Our world has truly become digital, as we continue to connect and share nearly everything via the web. Paypal was able to capitalize on this fact one decade ago (yeah, 10 years ago) when they revolutionized the online transfer of money. Tigerbow aims to follow a similar path and attempts to take the act of gift-giving to the digital world.
From browsing Tigerbow’s site, I get the impression that the soon-to-be founders were on Facebook one day and caught a glimpse at those sweet virtual gifts that they rolled out to their users. Who buys those $0.99 virtual lollipops, I’ll never know, but Tigerbow saw a big opportunity.
An actual gift is real and tangible. An actual gift is something you can touch without smudging your computer screen or getting arrested. An actual gift is made of atoms and molecules and matter, not just pixels and JPEGs and GIFs (no offense to virtual gifts - they’re pretty sweet too just way harder to chew).
-Tigerbow.com
Tigerbow Snapshot
This is the type of service that many would and will use. Think about all of your contacts and online “friends” (close or not) that you have compiled throughout all of your social networks and email address books. Now how many physical street addresses could you name from all of these individuals? Through my personal, quick-and-dirty math, I know approximately 1.17% of my contacts’ physical addresses (hey Mom, hey Dad). Conversely, I have about 90-99% of my contacts’ email addresses (and the odds of obtaining the remaining 1-10% of these is extremely high, especially when compared to obtaining their street address).
Bottom line is this. Tigerbow is offering the type of service that is guarnteed to catch on. The question is, “Will Tigerbow be the one standing when its all said and done?” In my opinion, the idea is there, it now depends upon execution. There are a few variables that will ultimately determine Tigerbow’s success/failure.
The first issue is that Tigerbow’s service relies upon people giving gifts. This immediately eliminates most shopping done online, for personal consumption. One must also take a look at the preferred methods of gift-giving during the holiday season, the time of year where most gifts are bought. I still believe that gifts in physical form, wrapped in a box, will be the preferred method, as opposed to the digital “email gift”. There still is a large market for more informal, impersonal gift exchanges, but it is worth noting the fact that most online spending and buying will most likely fly outside of Tigerbow’s radar. This could detract from Tigerbow’s initial momentum that is so crucial in startup companies.
The second issue lies in Tigerbow’s catalogue of products. Currently, they are offering products limited to the books and movies categories. I assume this is just the beginning of their offering as they state in their About Us section that they have over a million books and thousands of DVD and Blu-Ray movies, noting that they are “…adding a whole bunch of other stuff, too.” It’s critical to analyze how they plan on amassing their product catalog and how they intend to compete with offerings from large-scale e-retailers like Amazon, Overstock, and Buy.com. Right now, Amazon consistently beats Tigerbow’s prices by a considerable amount.
This brings me to my third issue, the ability for other e-retailers to adopt similar methods of this gift-giving model. Is it possible for an Amazon or Overstock to offer this to their dedicated community of shoppers without the Tigerbow in the equation? I have no idea what the answer to this question is, but I am eager to find out. A company like Tigerbow seems like someone who should be integrated into existing e-retailers’ sites, not someone who is essentially competing for attention against these giants. I’m sure the team at Tigerbow has researched all possibilities and has determined that this is the best strategy for their current situation.
My initial reaction to Tigerbow (other than the name) is optimistic. I really like the idea and like I have said before, I’m confident that this method of distributing items as gifts will catch on one way or another. I would like to see them integrate with existing e-retailers in the future, which is not unlikely and may depend upon their initial success as an independent retailer. As mentioned above, it will be interesting to see how the Amazon’s and Overstock’s react to this virtual gift platform. The team at Tigerbow reminds me a bit of the crew at Woot, in their quick jabs, lighthearted humor, and their ability to laugh at themselves. I truly wish these guys the best and hope they are able to finally give life to virtual gifts.