The gift of presents for expats

The expansion of the tech industry has been a double-edged sword for Gar Coen. After spending his school holidays working with Goodbody, he realised he wanted to be a stockbroker, and went to study in the UK. Once he finished his degree, he went to work at Merrill Lynch, and realised that the job he liked didn't exist anymore.

The big blackboard where the share prices were updated was gone, and the physical exchange now happened through digitally created means. This led him to further his education. His grá for the United States and the experience of seeing how it worked for friends and relatives before him, led him to San Francisco, where he completed an MBA, majoring in entrepreneurship.

In 2008, Coen was doing consultancy work for start-ups when IDA Ireland announced it was opening a new office in southern California. Despite being the outsider, he got the job, which gave him the chance to promote Ireland and help American companies through the process of setting up their European offices there.

“I was never going to play soccer for Ireland. But if I could do business for Ireland, I could take pride in that.”

YonderGift.com

After working with huge companies such as Riot Games, Ancestry.com and Overstock.com, Coen left the IDA.

“Six years is generally the longest the IDA will have someone in an overseas office. I was offered a job with them back in Dublin, but I’d been in California for 10 years at that point. My wife was from California, we were expecting our first child – my whole life was in California. So I finished up in August 2014.”

He chose a job with Eversheds, Ireland's only pan-European law firm, based on his knowledge of what US companies look for when growing internationally.

He’s a fan of Google’s “20 per cent time” initiative, which allows employees to allocate one day a week to a personal project. So, with the permission of Eversheds, “YonderGift.com became my one-day-a-week project”.

“It came from a real problem buying gifts for friends back home when you live abroad. It involves long queues at the post office, filling out custom forms, and sending a gift way in advance in the hope that it will reach your family in time – or at all.

“I kept thinking, there has to be an easier way of doing this. Every year I cursed myself for not doing something about it, thinking that someone else was bound to do it – but no one did. So when Eversheds gave me the opportunity, I thought ‘Right, let’s try and fix this.’”

YonderGift.com was then set up. It partners with independent local Irish businesses such as An Bhialann and the Fota Island Resort, allowing people anywhere in the world to buy from them.

They have a range of greeting cards that customers can choose from and use to write a personal note. The gift is packaged by hand from their office in Kilkenny, and shipped out to the recipient the next day.

“It’s a win-win for everyone – the expat abroad can buy a gift for their loved ones without the hassle; the local business receives support through extra income they wouldn’t normally have, and the family member gets a meaningful gift from their expat abroad.”

There were challenges at the beginning of the business, as Coen grappled with VAT around gift vouchers and cross-border rules, and how to pay the merchants directly once they had received payment. This latter problem was solved by partnering with payments company Stripe, based in Silicon Valley but founded by Limerick brothers John and Patrick Collison, allowing the company to begin taking orders in the past few months.

“We’ve had a kind of Christmas awakening, and we’re getting quite a lot of traffic as people bookmark things and make a note of coming back to it later. Irish people have this habit of thinking that they’re quite organised, and then rushing to buy things at the last minute!”

Benefit of working abroad

Coen believes that studying or working abroad is very important to broaden your perspective and vital to understand things in context.

“When you live so close to Silicon Valley, you’re in the middle of a tech bubble, so it’s easy to get caught up in the hype. But the Irish perspective helps shield you from that, because you think, ‘Will anyone outside of here care about that?’ Other expats have the same feeling.”

The difference between fast-evolving California and local Irish businesses is also remarkable: “Here, what you did yesterday is considered the old way of doing things. In Ireland, what I found when I was explaining YonderGift.com to local businesses, and telling them that they would have to digitalise a bit to make it work, they’d take out the black book with a list of all their gift voucher sales, with prices, names and dates and say ‘But this is how we’ve always done it’. Which is so beautiful in its simplicity, but also full of opportunities to evolve the Irish market.”