The Story of &Open: Building the Future of Enterprise Loyalty Through Thoughtful Gifting

Some of the most transformative business ideas come from experiencing a problem firsthand. For &Open, it started with a failed gift delivery from Airbnb. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, CEO Jonathan Legge shared how this moment led to building a platform that’s reshaping how global brands think about loyalty and relationships.

Before &Open, Jonathan and his co-founders ran a boutique e-commerce business. “Over like 33% of our revenue was coming from corporate requests,” he recalls. “The likes of Google Meta, Airbnb, their marketing teams getting in contact with us and looking to put together gifts for events.”

The pivotal moment came when they became Airbnb hosts themselves. “We experienced their gifting firsthand. They tried to gift a guest of ours. We saw how generous they were trying to be with their gifting, but we also just saw how epically wrong it went,” Jonathan explains. The gift never reached its recipient, and Airbnb had no idea the delivery had failed.

Seeing this breakdown in what should have been a meaningful interaction, they reached out to Airbnb with a bold claim – they could do it better. The initial response was skeptical: “We really appreciate that, but you guys are way too small. You’re operating out of your garden shed. We’re gifting across the globe and there’s no way you could help us do this better.”

But persistence paid off. After securing a meeting with Airbnb’s team, they were invited to participate in an RFP against eleven US retailers. “You are definitely the wild cards. You’re the only european company pitching,” Jonathan recalls being told. “But if you’re willing to commit to a six month process, we’re willing to listen to you for the next six months.”

What followed was a complete reimagining of their business. Rather than just shipping products, they built an infrastructure for thoughtful, global gifting. After winning the contract, they made an unusual decision – they would serve only Airbnb for two years, learning and building their foundations before taking on additional clients.

This patience proved crucial. Operating from Ireland meant mastering complex cross-border logistics early: “Through a lot of hard lessons and being forced to do so from a tiny island on the edge of the Atlantic,” as Jonathan puts it. These challenges became advantages as they scaled globally.

Their approach to gifting itself was revolutionized. Rather than sending generic corporate gifts, they focused on creating meaningful moments. Working with Spotify during the pandemic, they designed contextual experiences: “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.”

Today, &Open handles over a million gifts annually for global brands like Spotify, Atlassian, and Etsy. But Jonathan sees this as just the beginning. “The question we’ve been talking about a lot of recent is like, how do you scale thoughtfulness?” he explains. The vision is to build a comprehensive “gifting ecosystem” that connects senders, recipients, and vendors in new ways.

“We’re building out our on demand offer,” Jonathan shares, describing their expansion plans. “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 ultimate goal? To transform how businesses think about loyalty and relationships. “For us, it’s very much about loyalty,” 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.”

In a world where digital connections often feel hollow, &Open is betting that thoughtful gifting can bridge the gap between brands and people, creating lasting relationships one carefully chosen gift at a time.