Making it easier to send gifts, since 2015

From a Bristol coffee app to a B2B gifting platform used by thousands of companies. Here's how we got here.

Where it started: A coffee and a thank you

We started as a gifting app in 2017. The idea was simple - send someone a coffee. A quick thank you for helping with a house move, a pick-me-up on a bad day. We launched with 20 independent coffee shops in Bristol, then spread across London.

By 2019, we'd signed Caffè Nero and had 1,300 locations on the platform. But something interesting was happening: people were using Huggg at work. Managers sending coffees to their teams. Sales reps thanking clients. Nobody asked them to - they just found it useful.

So we followed them. That's how Huggg became a B2B platform.

When coffee shops closed, we had to get creative

Then the pandemic hit. Coffee shops shut overnight, and we had to figure out what Huggg was for.

Turns out: quite a lot.

We realised our platform could distribute welfare vouchers quickly and without the usual admin. Within days, we'd supplied £100,000 worth of free school meal supermarket vouchers. The British Red Cross came to us next. Our B2G platform - Huggg for government and public sector - was born. Today it delivers millions of vouchers.

And while that was happening, we solved another problem: how do you send a physical gift to a remote employee when you don't have their address? We made it possible. No address needed.

Corporate gifting, minus the corporate

Today, we make it easier to recognise your teams, colleagues and customers. More personal than a generic gift card. More human than a points system.

Whether you're showing appreciation to your team, adding a personal touch to sales outreach, or saying thank you to a client - we're here to make it easy. And actually meaningful.

From nearly shutting down to working with thousands of companies, we've learned one thing: people want to say thank you. They just need it to be simple enough to actually do it. That's what Huggg is for.

Huggg has two sides. This one is for businesses - employee recognition, client gifting, team moments. Our  payments platform is for councils, housing providers and charities delivering welfare and crisis support.