Dmitriy 00:02
For us, it's geopolitical tensions that really keep me up at night. They create challenges in terms of people management and bonding, and some of the challenge is really just getting people to be safe.
Narrator 00:16
Welcome to the E-comm Show podcast. I am your host Andrew Maff, owner and founder of Bluetuskr. From groundbreaking industry updates to success stories and strategies, get to know the ins and outs of the e-commerce industry from top leaders in the space. Let's get into it!
Andrew Maff 00:16
Wow, very interesting — the logistics of that sound crazy. You're servicing over 200 different countries, all with gift baskets, so you obviously have perishables and things like that too. That's a serious operational task. Can you tell me a bit about it — do you order stuff from certain countries and then have it all in one warehouse? Is it more of a drop-shipping model? How's the back end of all that working?
Andrew Maff 00:31
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the E-comm Show. As usual, I am your host Andrew Maff, and today I'm joined by the amazing Dmitriy Petregudov, founder and CEO over at Gift Baskets Overseas. Dmitriy, how are you doing, buddy? Ready for a good show?
Dmitriy 00:45
Hi, Andrew. Not too bad. Thanks for having me.
Andrew Maff 00:47
Yeah, super excited to have you on the show. I've got a little bit of experience in the gift baskets space, and your concept is wild to me — being able to do this type of stuff is very interesting, very cool. Super excited to get into it. I like starting things off pretty typically — I just want to give you the floor. Tell us a little about your background, how you got started with Gift Baskets Overseas, and we'll take it from there.
Dmitriy 01:08
Sure. Well, I have a degree in computer science and engineering, so my first foray into e-comm was through the tech side. I built a website on my own back in the day, sort of started doing it while still working in high-tech full time, and it started as a hobby business, then eventually transitioned into doing it full time, growing it from a bootstrapping stage to where it is today. I've been at it since 2002, I'll say — so it's been about 24 years, quite a bit. So yeah, here we are.
Andrew Maff 01:59
You've really been at it. So what got you to start Gift Baskets Overseas?
Dmitriy 02:06
So I'd been living away from my family in Eastern Europe — I immigrated to the U.S. and was trying to stay in touch, sending flowers back home, and I realized the services available at the time weren't that great. I figured, well, I need something for myself and for my friends who lived away from home too, something we could set up. So I started doing it country by country, using the service myself as part of that, and eventually grew it into a global company servicing 200 countries today. And along the way we transitioned from a consumer model to more of a corporate model as well, so now we're servicing both consumers and corporations.
Dmitriy 03:35
Sure, that's a great question. It's a combination model. In some more strategic locations, we have our own warehouses that we ship out of. In others, it's certainly a drop-shipping model — especially in less critical, less strategic destinations — where we build a network of local suppliers we work with, and they operate according to our blueprint. We design all the gifts, all the baskets, in-house, and then share the blueprint and specs for how to put them together. So it works almost like a franchise model in part, but they still operate as independent entities doing their own thing — for our stuff, they do it our way, and that's how we spread it across the world.
Andrew Maff 04:27
Wow, that's a very interesting approach, and that's got to be difficult across 200 countries. I know you're not a small business — an eight-figure brand — so it's obviously doing pretty well. How many people are on your team right now?
Dmitriy 04:39
We have 100 people on this brand — well, set of brands. I also run another company called Gift Sender, which now has 20 people. It's more like a startup that grew out of this one, and it now has its own team. So 120 in total, across those two teams.
Andrew Maff 05:00
Wow. So that approach — you're catering to people who live in a certain country but want to buy something for someone in another country. That's a very specific audience to hone in on. From a marketing perspective, how do you position that? Where are you seeing more success — is it coming from search, from people already looking for this type of thing, or is there more top-of-funnel awareness work going on through social media and other initiatives?
Dmitriy 05:31
Yeah, basically everything you listed. Our initial focus was on inbound and search engine optimization — that was the big driver of early success, coupled with some paid search. And now, of course, there's AI, which is part of the channel too, both paid and organic. Brands that have been around are well regarded by AI — ChatGPT certainly sends us a lot of recommendations. So we see that as one of the important drivers today, complementing organic search. Top-of-funnel hasn't gone anywhere, though — it's still definitely important, educating customers who don't know we exist yet, and providing that longer-term nurturing. That's still the game, but it's a combination of things.
Andrew Maff 06:35
So you're obviously preaching to the choir when it comes to AI visibility. You're starting to see, I guess, more organic revenue stemming from AI referencing you. Maybe it hasn't surpassed organic search yet, but you're seeing that consistent growth?
Dmitriy 06:53
Yeah, it's certainly growing fairly fast. It's still a small percentage — under 10% of the total, I think — but it's grown tremendously fast compared to any other channel. Whether it's taking away from search or complementing it, you can look at it either way, depending on where you're seeing it, but it's certainly growing fast. So making sure we're there, more findable and easier to be included, is certainly one of the important challenges we're facing.
Andrew Maff 07:35
Yeah, and are you seeing higher conversion rates out of the people coming through ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, that type of thing?
Dmitriy 07:42
Well, it's hard to know the conversion rate, because we don't necessarily know how many people are being served information about us. It's growing in terms of absolute numbers, but conversion rates are very hazy at the moment. When we get more into paid recommendations on ChatGPT, which we're now playing with — just the first few months in — that should give us more data on conversion, at least on the paid side, which should be a lot more transparent than organic. But we hope to know more about both pretty soon.
Andrew Maff 08:30
So we're sitting right at the front door of Q4 right now. I'd imagine, for a brand like yours, Q4 is probably a very busy season.
Dmitriy 08:36
Yeah, it's huge. We build everything around Q4 and the beginning of Q1 — everything happens from October to January, and the majority of our sales, the majority of our revenue, happens during those three months. The rest of the year is basically just about being there, so to speak — not really when we make our money. But the Q4 part is super important.
Dmitriy 09:16
Well, we're certainly a lot more focused on certain industries we work with on the corporate side, where we see more need for businesses to use gifting in their sales outreach and loyalty programs. So integrating with those is quite important for us, and we've been working on it not just now, but for most of the year — getting ourselves a lot more known to those industries, attending conferences fairly often nowadays, and getting into the right places to be found, so to speak. So beyond search, attending industry conferences has certainly been a focus.
Andrew Maff 09:54
So, any plans this quarter that'll be different from what you've done in the past, or is it kind of business as usual this year?
Andrew Maff 10:14
Yeah. Well, even factoring in the search side — I've got a theory right now that this Q4 is probably going to be one of the craziest in terms of how frequently people use AI to help them shop, whether they're businesses looking for client gifts or your average consumer. Just because people have gotten a lot more used to using these platforms this year, I'm anticipating a pretty big jump there. Are you thinking you might see the same, even on the B2B side?
Dmitriy 10:45
Yeah, I see the B2B side as still H2H, right — human to human. Humans still make those decisions. They search just like consumers do; they may have different pain points, but the way they look for information is often fairly similar, especially in-season. They don't have time, they want to give quickly, they want things organized well, delivered on time, with good quality, and so on. Those are still very human things to expect. And in this business, trust is super important, so I think AI adds a lot to trust. If someone's recommended by an AI that the consumer, or a business buyer, has previously trusted on other questions, that trust carries into the conversation. If you just do a Google search and a website pops up, that's not quite the same as trusting Google to recommend something in the first five positions. When you have a conversation, it really builds that trust as part of it. So I think there's a much deeper connection with the brand, from AI's perspective, to the consumer.
Andrew Maff 11:56
Yeah, no, I completely agree, and that's typically why you end up seeing those higher conversion rates coming out of AI platforms — at least for the people who did get directed to the site from AI. One of the things I was thinking about: you've got all these different locations across 200-something countries, and it's obviously not a small business. Is your team mostly remote employees, correct?
Dmitriy 12:21
Yeah, every single employee is remote. Correct.
Andrew Maff 12:25
Wow. So tell me a little about how you maintain that culture — that company culture. We're a fully remote company as well, and it's always interesting to hear everyone's take on how to do it, because a lot has changed. When everyone was remote, you kind of miss out a little on the camaraderie that's sometimes necessary within an office. What's been your approach so far?
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Dmitriy 13:22
Sure, no, it's a great question. We've been doing remote from day one, long before COVID hit. A lot of companies ended up forcing their workforce to go remote because of the pandemic, and then some stayed remote or converted to fully or partially remote — but for us there wasn't a lot of change. I do think a lot of the tools that got created as part of that, to help teams work better, certainly helped. But we've been building that culture for quite some time. We organize corporate trips, which are a big part of our DNA and culture, and we specifically pick two or three countries every year that we visit as a team. Our goal is to visit all 200 in the lifetime of the company, but we're pretty far from that — I think we're at 25 or 26 at the moment. We try to hit at least one or two countries every year, and this year we did Portugal and Peru. So it's been a good couple of countries this year. Those trips are quite unique — we get to put names to faces. Some people have never traveled with a company before, or their first trip is with us. So we end up connecting people that way, getting to know each other in a much more personal way. The trips usually take about a week, and we don't do a lot of work stuff — we mostly do team building and travel together, play games, and just bond however we can.
Andrew Maff 15:31
So you're taking your fully remote team and sending them to different countries every year, to travel together and, I'm sure, learn more about the product line and things like that. That's awesome. My team's going to listen to this and start expecting me to ship them all over the world now. That's very cool. What inspired you to start doing that with them?
Dmitriy 15:57
Back when I was much younger, in my early 20s, I used to be a camp counselor, and I remember that culture of camps, where kids, teenagers, and young adults network and create this microclimate of trust — a relationship that's beyond any particular idea or work, just on a human level. I think that really drove me to do the same in our company. And it really helps, because we have a lot of people from various countries — people from South America, like Colombia and Brazil; people from Eastern Europe, some from Ukraine, some from Russia; then people from Asia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and so on. We have this very multinational team, plus some people from North America. To get all these people talking to each other, understanding each other, and enjoying working together, they need to get to know each other as people. So that's become a tradition now, and it also comes back to our core values — we really cherish diversity, and I think that's what makes us strong. We have quite a diverse team in terms of culture, country of origin, and background, and that's what makes us stronger together. These trips make it real.
Andrew Maff 17:35
Very interesting. I've heard some interesting responses about what remote teams do to build culture, but I've got to admit, I haven't heard "I ship them all over the world for travel experiences" before. That's awesome. Every time we do these interviews, it's always, "here's all the cool stuff our company's doing, here's how we do this, here's how we do that." One of the things I always like to ask, because I find it's the one thing people try to steer away from — what's bothering you right now? What's keeping you up at night? What are you struggling with?
Dmitriy 18:09
Well, the world has changed quite a bit in the last few years. A number of wars have started around the world — some have perhaps ended, according to the commander in chief, but generally there are also new ones that have started. We struggle with that, because we have people who've been affected by it. Some of our people are actually from Russia, and they had to leave the country and immigrate to live elsewhere, just to avoid dealing with the war. Same with people from Ukraine — they have to deal with it too. That puts some pressure on the culture and on mutual understanding of those kinds of situations. So for us, it's geopolitical tensions that really keep me up at night — they create challenges around people management and bonding, and some of the challenge is really just getting people to be safe. That's been especially true in the early years of the Russia-Ukraine war — quite a challenge for us.
Andrew Maff 19:25
Yeah, and with product all over the world and being shipped all over the world — have you been affected by tariffs at any point over the past few years?
Dmitriy 19:36
Yeah, I think we've definitely been affected. Our model is always local shipping — it always happens locally, through a local warehouse — so we very rarely cross a border with the actual gifts. But we're affected on the pricing side, because when something gets imported, it gets taxed differently, and tariffs add complexity and cost to the actual contents of the gift. So if our supplier, or our own warehouse, is putting together the basket to send, the basket obviously becomes more expensive, and the consumer needs to adjust to that — something they used to spend $50 or $100 on is going to end up being a much smaller gift. So you have to educate the consumer that tariffs, plus inflation, plus fuel prices, all together sometimes push the overall gift cost up by 30, 40, even 50% within a year or two — and that's a very quick price adjustment for someone to handle. If you have a corporate policy, say, with a $50 gift limit, and you used to be able to send a $50 basket that was small but reasonably decent, today that $50 isn't going to buy nearly as much, because you have to account for import costs, taxation, and higher fuel costs. So you end up with a much smaller gift. That's a challenge where the consumer needs to adjust, and we need to talk about it in the right way so it doesn't sound like we're just trying to make more money. That's a challenge.
Andrew Maff 21:27
That is very interesting — hadn't thought about that part. Yeah, it's very impressive what you've built, and where you're at and where you're going, given all the logistical challenges involved. But it's very cool. I really appreciate you joining us — I don't want to take up too much more of your time, I know you're super busy. I'd love to give you the floor — tell everyone where they can find out more about you, and of course more about Gift Baskets Overseas.
Dmitriy 21:51
Sure. We're active on LinkedIn and Instagram as Gifts Overseas, and we also have a separate sub-brand called Gift Sender. It's a gifting platform that lets companies automate their gifting at scale and integrate with CRM and HRM systems, for anyone who wants gifting as part of their sales funnel and loyalty program — something else we've built. I wanted to mention that Gift Sender is another brand we own and operate. But other than that, I'm looking forward to any questions that come up, and happy to respond. I'm also reachable by email — happy to hear from everyone.
Andrew Maff 22:48
Perfect, Dmitriy, thank you for being on the show. And everyone who tuned in, thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual thing: rate, review, subscribe, all that fun stuff, on whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to theecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes. As usual, thank you all for joining us, and we'll see you all next time. Have a good one!
Narrator 23:06
Thank you for tuning in to the E-comm Show. Head over to ecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, or on the Bluetuskr YouTube channel. The E-comm Show is brought to you by Bluetuskr, a full-service digital marketing company specifically for e-commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to Bluetuskr.com now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the E-comm Show!