Sam Hogg, founder of the two-month old GiftZip.com, has taken second place in the Great Lakes Entrepreneur’s Quest contest. The $1,000 award is for the business plan that the MSU Eli Broad Graduate School of Management grad developed for his online gift card business.
Hogg calls it a virtual gift card kiosk and it appears to be a hit. Over the holidays, the site got 10,000 page views.
“I conceived of the idea in a sustainable supply chain class,” he tells Media Rica in a podcast on the GLEQ channel. The wasted resources in packaging gift cards and requiring people to get in their cars to pick up something weighing four ounces seems ludicrous, he says.
“Why not put it all in one place?” says Hogg.
The GiftZip site enables users to browse through images of cards from retailers in a variety of categories, including gift cards for kids, pets, sports, technology, clothes, food, travel and more. Shoppers can click on the pictured card and link directly to the point-of-sale on the retailers’ Web site. Users do not give any information to GiftZip, nor does the service cost anything.
Hogg says he’ll use the $1,000 prize for site development. He envisions an iPhone application so users can send, receive and scan gift cards. He also plans to plug into Facebook.
Source: Lauer Sauer, Netvantage Marketing; Great Lakes Entrepreneur’s Quest
Gretchen Cochran, the Innovations & Jobs editor, may be contacted here.
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