The Product Evolution of &Open: From E-commerce Store to Enterprise Platform
Sometimes the path to building an enterprise platform starts with identifying what’s broken in your own backyard. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, &Open CEO Jonathan Legge shared how they transformed a small e-commerce operation into a platform shipping over a million gifts annually.
The E-commerce Foundation
The journey began with a simple observation: “Over like 33% of our revenue was coming from corporate requests,” Jonathan explains. “The likes of Google Meta, Airbnb, their marketing teams getting in contact with us and looking to put together gifts for events.”
This organic demand signaled a larger opportunity, but it took experiencing the problem firsthand to understand how to build the solution.
The Pivot Point
Being Airbnb hosts gave them unique insight into enterprise gifting’s challenges. As Jonathan recalls: “We experienced their gifting firsthand… Nobody knew they were sending a gift. In particular, the guest, who was the intended recipient, had no idea they were going to get a gift. And then they also had no idea that they’d even tried to gift. And Airbnb had no idea that the gift had failed.”
This experience led to a complete reimagining of their platform. “We pitched like crazy and reimagined our e-commerce business and rethought the infrastructure, kind of tried to connect the dots in a different way,” Jonathan shares.
Building Global Infrastructure
Scaling from a local operation to a global platform required significant infrastructure development. Today, &Open operates with “three different fulfillment partners working with us across North America, across Europe, across Australia, to cover the wider APAC region, and specifically then out of Shanghai to cover China.”
This expansion wasn’t just about logistics. They had to solve complex cross-border challenges: “When you start to do it across Europe, across APAC, cross border, just taxes, duties, everything else kind of starts to blow up in your face.”
Reimagining the Gift Experience
A key product innovation was rethinking how recipients interact with gifts. Rather than just shipping items, they created curated choice experiences. As Jonathan describes one campaign for Spotify: “The messaging was like, we don’t even know if you wear pants anymore because all we’ve seen is your head for the last year. But if you do wear pants, we found the best possible pair of pants.”
Recipients could choose between the pants, a Headspace subscription, or donating to Black Girls Code – making the gift both thoughtful and flexible.
Building for Scale
The platform had to scale rapidly once they won Airbnb. “Went from sending a few hundred gifts out the door every month with our small ecommerce business to sending out 3000 gifts a week within the period of six months,” Jonathan recalls.
This growth required building robust systems while maintaining quality. Today, they’re expanding their marketplace: “Building out our on demand offer… how do we take that further and lace in apparel and print on demand, and how do we take that even further and start to work with a lot of our manufacturers directly via the marketplace and build out a truly self serve solution?”
The Future Platform
Looking ahead, &Open is building what Jonathan calls a “gifting ecosystem” that connects senders, recipients, and vendors. The vision extends beyond corporate gifting to become a comprehensive loyalty platform. As Jonathan explains: “Loyalty matters now more than ever. From loyal employees to loyal customers, like retaining a customer and growing with that customer becoming an advocate of your brand, that’s like hundreds of times more valuable than acquiring new customers.”
For B2B founders evolving from point solutions to enterprise platforms, &Open’s journey offers valuable lessons in identifying market signals, building robust infrastructure, and maintaining product quality through rapid scaling. Sometimes the best path to building an enterprise platform starts with deeply understanding a single use case.