A new website makes it easy to shop local to support small L.A. businesses
Need a last-minute gift, and don’t want to be something impersonal or imported from overseas and help Los Angeles small business owners at the same time, faster than Amazon?
Local startup Giftphoria.com has Angelenos, at least on the east side for now, covered with fun and niche gifts from Los Angeles small businesses that are curated for the recipient. The one-stop marketplace uses an AI quizzing system that helps you figure out, find, buy, and wrap the perfect gift for any person, powered by gamified quizzes connected to their AI recommender.
The company was cofounded by Californian Anthony “Tony” Dikran Abaci, an Armenian-American businessman, and his partner, Nic Clar, who personally delivers the gifts for a just $7 fee. The small businesses right now are centered in Silver Lake, Hollywood, Echo Park and other area shops, but the partners plan to expand across Los Angeles, and maybe even nationwide.
“Tony came to me with a niche idea: helping people find & buy gifts. He had a hypothesis that people who were ‘bad at gifting’ was more so a lack of convenience. People didn’t know where to find gifts, and they didn’t think far ahead enough to get them in time. As we began hacking a solution, another opportunity made itself clear: local stores were suffering due to poor online visibility, and no one was tapping into the huge inventory they offered,” Clar wrote in a LinkedIn post.
Clar and Abaci spent roughly two months “building a marketplace that helps people to find & buy gifts from local independent stores and get them delivered within 2 hours,” he wrote. At least one terrible gift-giving staff member at Los Angeles plans to put it giftphoria.com to the test as early as possible.