ISSUE 01 · FOUNDER NOTES
There wasn't one dramatic moment when HappyyNest was born. There was no disastrous gifting experience, no sudden flash of inspiration, and definitely no evening when my wife and I looked at each other and decided that someone really needed to solve this problem.
The truth is much simpler than that.
I have always been a sucker for new and meaningful experiences, and I am also quite particular about the things I buy and use. When I started dating my girlfriend, who is now my wife, she used to find it incredibly difficult to gift me something because I almost always had an opinion about it.
I would wonder why a company hadn't made something properly, why they had chosen a particular material, why they had added one feature while forgetting something obvious, or how the product could have been so much better with one small change.
My wife, on the other hand, is an artist at heart, and when she couldn't find something she liked, she would often make it herself. She made handmade cards, magic boxes, hampers and all sorts of personalised things that, at the time, I didn't even have names for. What stood out was that there was always thought behind what she made, and often that thought mattered far more than the monetary value of whatever was inside.
Years passed, we got married and, hopefully, became a little more mature, although my habit of having opinions about products survived. Somewhere along the way, we also started noticing something about gifting that stayed with us.
A lot of gifts don't really feel like gifts.
There is no shortage of things that look like gifts. They are wrapped beautifully, there is usually a ribbon somewhere, and if you put enough things into a nice-looking box, you technically have a hamper.
But when I looked at many of them, I often found myself wondering why those particular things were inside. Why did they belong together? Why were they right for the person receiving them? More importantly, why were they right for the occasion being celebrated?
Once you start asking those questions, you begin to notice the same problem in a lot of places.
It became even more apparent when we started buying gifts for children in our own family. There were plenty of options, so availability was never really the problem. There were flashy toys, products with screens, things that children might be excited about for ten minutes and forget about the following week, and then there were the same familiar gifts that most of us have seen countless times before.
There wasn't necessarily anything wrong with these products individually, but we kept feeling that there should be something in between. We wanted things that could be useful without being boring, fun without needing a screen, beautiful without being selected only because they would photograph well, and personal without personalisation simply meaning that someone's name had been printed on them.
The occasions themselves made this even more interesting.
We in India don't just only celebrate birthdays. We have Godh Bharai, Naamkaran, Annaprashan, Mundan, half birthdays, first birthdays and dozens of other smaller moments that families turn into memories in their own ways.
What I found strange was that when you went looking for gifts for these very different occasions, you often ended up being shown remarkably similar things.
That didn't make much sense to us because a Mundan isn't an Annaprashan, a six-month milestone isn't a first birthday, and a gift meant for a mother-to-be doesn't necessarily need to become another gift for the baby.
These moments mean different things to the people celebrating them, so we felt that perhaps the gifts around them should reflect that difference too.
That thinking eventually became HappyyNest.
We didn't start HappyyNest because we believed that the world desperately needed another gifting company, and we certainly didn't wake up one morning convinced that we were going to revolutionise gifting.
We simply felt that there was room to make gifting a little more thoughtful.
For us, that means starting with the occasion rather than starting with a box and figuring out what can be put inside it. It means asking why a particular product belongs in a hamper before adding it. When we are choosing for children, it means making room for play, creativity and curiosity. It also means taking the smaller family rituals seriously, even when they don't receive much attention from the larger gifting market.
In many ways, it comes back to the same annoying question I have apparently been asking for most of my life: could this have been done better?
I don't expect us to always get the answer right. Some ideas will work and some won't. We will change products, rethink hampers, discover things that customers care about which we hadn't considered, and probably realise from time to time that something we were completely convinced about was wrong.
I think that is simply part of building something.
It is also one of the reasons I wanted this section of HappyyNest to exist.
Welcome to The Flip Side.
I don't want this to become a place where every article begins with an interesting thought and somehow ends with a reason to buy one of our hampers.
I would rather use it to write about the things we think about while building HappyyNest, including the rituals we often take for granted, what we are learning about gifting, why we are increasingly drawn towards screen-free play, how we decide what belongs in a hamper and what doesn't, and the things we notice about childhood as we build products around it.
There will also be things our customers teach us, things about the gifting industry that we don't quite understand, and occasionally, things we think everyone else might be getting wrong.
HappyyNest may not have a grand origin story, and I am actually quite comfortable with that. We started with a fairly simple belief that gifting could be more thoughtful, more relevant to the occasion and more intentional about what eventually reaches the person receiving it.
We have a lot to learn, a lot to question and, I suspect, quite a few opinions still to form along the way.
The Flip Side is where I want to write about all of it.
