Startup Ideas in Gift & Celebrations

Santosh Pandey

Cofounder, Offering Happiness

The eighth session on ‘Entrepreneurship Talk Series’ was conducted on April 26, 2020, from 3:00 pm. The speaker for the session was Mr. Santosh Pandey, the Cofounder of Offering Happiness. The topic of the discussion was “Startup Ideas in Gift and Celebrations”. There were around 60 participants over the online zoom session.

Mr Pandey started the session by briefly sharing his experiences of starting a business venture on his innovative idea. The gift sharing industry was a completely new industry in the context of Nepal and Mr. Pandey had to face lots of problems to sustain and continue his business. He started his business from ground level and developed the basic foundation of the business. 

As business was a completely new field for him, Mr. Pandey faced various problems such as lack of funds to meet operational cost, lack of proper mentoring, lack of promotional activities and marketing. After winning the Global Student Entrepreneur Award, he got various mentorship and ideas for scaling his business through various international resource persons. 

Having a supportive team and proper guidance from a mentor, Mr. Pandey was able to take his business to the next level by creating a gift/experience platform. He started adopting the crazy and innovative idea and concept of sharing happiness among the people by outsourcing with restaurants, partnering with various other businesses like bakery shops, movie hall, and so on. 

His business intended to change the behavior of people from a traditional gift-giving culture to innovative and surprising ways of sharing emotion and experiences. He shared a beautiful insight that the gift industry doesn’t deal with just physical gifts but it is attached to the emotional aspects of people. They give smiles, happiness, and experiences to people. A personal gift, festival gift were the traditional gifting culture and now corporate gifting culture has been established in Nepal as well. He classified gifts into two categories i.e product gift and experience gift.

Upon being asked by a participant regarding the major learning from his entrepreneurial journey, he said that the main focus for any business should be to make a strong foundation with efficient team members. He shared that business people should learn from the mistakes they make in their journey and have patience to enact properly according to the situation. 

Mr. Pandey concluded the session by motivating the participants by stating if they have hope within themselves, they can continue their journey and tackle every challenging situation. He also shared his belief that his gift and experience sharing company will be the industry leader in Nepal.

• By Sumina Pradhan