Storytelling about Tinggly with Migle Rakauskaite

William Tincup: [00:00:00] Ladies and gentlemen, this is William Tincup, and you are listening to the Use Case Podcast. Today we have Ming Le on from Tingley, and that’s with two Gs, by the way, so T I N G L E Y. And we’re going to be learning about the business case or use case for Tingley. So while we do introductions, Ming Le, would you do us a favor and introduce yourself and Tingley?

Thank you.

Migle Rakauskaite: Yes, of course. Hello everyone. Really excited to be here. Thank you, William, for inviting us here. As you mentioned, my name is Miglia and I’m representing Tingley Company today.[00:01:00] I’m head of growth at Tingley and already spent three years with the company.

And, I think we started a while ago actually seven years already but the first years we’re dedicating for developing the product and the recent years we we started to build brand image and let to get to know our audience and let them know about Tingly. But the whole idea of Tingly was that one of our founders decided that, he wanted to change that culture of gifting.

And he came up with the idea that, during regular celebrations we tend to give each other stuff which does not create You know, any additional happiness to us does not create memories doesn’t have a long life feeling. And he wanted to change that. He [00:02:00] wanted to create something meaningful, something that would connect people.

And he came up with the idea that it’s better to give each other experiences instead of Thank you. Old fashioned regular stuff, which usually doesn’t give you any good. So this is how Tingly started and he wanted that those experiences would be hand picked and would be something extraordinary.

So here you go. Today Tingly is an experienced gifting company. We are a global product. That means that the recipient can choose and do the experience in almost anywhere in the world. We sell a bundle of experiences. So that means that the recipient has a full freedom to choose whatever they like to do.

And, maybe they prefer [00:03:00] some soft kind of experiences like beer tasting, wine tasting, food tour, or cooking class in Italy. Or maybe they are more like adrenaline interested people and they would like to do some bungee jumping or just ski ride or something similar. And yeah.

William Tincup: No. I, what I love about this is fantastic.

What I love about this is my wife and I, with our kids years ago. We decided not to do a lot of gifts, Christmas and birthday and just do experiences. Yeah, they get, they do get gifts, but it’s we noticed like in the first couple of years, it was just there’s just a bunch of gifts and then they’d burn through them and it’s stuff that, you know.

You can’t take it with you. You’re probably not going to remember it. And and y’all have taken that, that taken an idea like that, like instead of things like giving somebody a Starbucks gift card, which could be, considered an experience, but really normally it’s just a gift card to go get coffee.[00:04:00]

And it’s just a thing, which is good. Rather than not getting anything, right? So if it’s versus nothing, okay, so I’d rather have the Starbucks gift card. But you’re then saying there’s an array of experiences. Pick the experience that you choose or that, that speaks to you.

Migle Rakauskaite: Exactly. And, we, all of the team and everyone associated with Tingly, they actually believe the slogan of Believe It. And it says give stories, not stuff. We believe that, experiences create stories, they create memories, they connect people, they bring you happiness. And there is so much more value in just the regular stuff.

And it’s not easy, because it’s a cultural thing, and it’s not an easy thing to change. But it seems that in current years, we see a major shift. And Especially after COVID 19, people really, [00:05:00] started to believe this, and it seems that they want to spend more time with their loved ones, they want to spend their time wisely.

They want to spend their time doing something meaningful. Yeah, so there’s a bit of tingly.

William Tincup: Do you think COVID, most of the people that have talked about COVID or what people have learned from the pandemic is that people have reassessed life. They’ve reassessed work, they’ve reassessed marriages, they’ve reassessed, all kinds of things in their life.

Do you think that some of this is an outpouring of that, that, I don’t. I don’t need a, I don’t need a thing. I, I’ve been cooped up for three, two and a half years, whatever. And I want to experience life because they’ve seen life be, fleeting in a sense.

Migle Rakauskaite: I totally agree with this one.

And I think this is what is happening. It seems People want to live their lives now and they don’t want to wait. [00:06:00] I think everyone was very scared and you know they lost some of the families lost their loved ones and it’s a horrible thing and you know we always say you know there is not better timing than now and that shift is happening right now and actually you know I’m very happy about it, not only because, tingly or completely separately as a person, I’m happy to see that people start to become conscious about what they do and how they spend their time and…

But they just, want to improve it in a way. Yeah, but of course we see a tendency and a shift in as a company as well. And we actually quite recently done a survey in the United States where we asked people about, exactly about COVID 19, how they feel after COVID 19, what concerns they [00:07:00] have.

And, Is there is any kind of shift in what they used to do and what they do now? And we got the results which were Shocking actually, and we were very pleased with that because two thirds of the employees said that they would rather get an experience as an incentive over cash. So for us, that was a very interesting finding and we are very happy to see that the shift is happening already.

William Tincup: So tell us a little bit about the buyer of these stories, not stuff. Who are we? Who’s buying? Thank you.

Migle Rakauskaite: Alright, so we do have two sites. So we have B2C and B2B, let’s say. So it’s divided in two parts. So B2C is regular people who look for credits, [00:08:00] Outstanding and extraordinary gift it’s actually usually women because women tend to take care of gifts in their families and to buy those ones for their loved ones, but of course we have lots of men as our audience too and they tend to choose Stingley on various occasions.

Sometimes it’s a really, Merry Christmas gift collection. Sometimes it is, happy birthday wishes. Sometimes they choose a wedding gift. Actually, our wedding gifts is one of the bestsellers. And it seems especially on a wedding day, you want to give something something, for those people to remember.

And They are usually going on a honeymoon and you can use Tingly, as I said, locally or while traveling and While they’re on a honeymoon. Yeah, so we, we have various collections and those ones are dedicated for [00:09:00] different occasions. And then there is a B2B site. So we do a corporate gifting as well, and corporates and companies tend to choose us as an incentive for their employees. They want to create that connection and belonging feeling for their employees.

They want them, their employees would be happy and would spend more time with their loved ones or with their colleagues, it really depends. But they tend to choose our gifts for retirement gifts, for recognition, for incentive, for sometimes for prizes if they do some contest. Yeah, so it’s two

William Tincup: sided.

I like that. On the business side so on the B2B side of things, is it the buyer being kind of total rewards? People that are, historically looked at upon as the people that have [00:10:00] bought gifting, not gifting platform, but it’s like service awards and things like that.

Are those the folks that historically or historically, those are the folks that, it’s the comp benefits, rewards, kind of total rewards and some umbrella in the U S again, it’s different around the world, of course are those the folks B2B wise that you’re selling into?

Is it more HR or is it operations, et cetera?

Migle Rakauskaite: It really depends, to be honest, but in the United States, yes, still, in most of the cases, it is HR, people who are looking how to bring better benefits to the teams, to the employees, and they are looking for more creative ways. Sometimes we do have, C level managers or operational people who make the decision in that field.

But in most of the cases, it’s HR.

William Tincup: That’s perfect. [00:11:00] So tell me, this is always, I’m always been curious about this. I know you get asked this a jillion different times in a week, but how do, how does a company budget or how do they assess what they should spend on their employees? And again, historically this has been on stuff, right?

And y’all are thinking more on how do we create experiences and stories, but it’s still going to be a budget. It’s still going to be a line item and an Excel spreadsheet somewhere, right? So how do you guide people through the budgeting process? That’s

Migle Rakauskaite: a very interesting question to be honest, and I’m not really sure if I’m the best person to answer this, but through my experience with B2B cases and, communication with HR people, yes, sometimes it’s really hard to a hard decision to make, so how much you’re going to spend on your people.

And I always tell to explain them that, you probably need to [00:12:00] count how much it costs for you a turnover of one person, because if, that person is going to leave that company, you will have to find another one. Yeah. You have to do the training. You have to spend. Money while looking for them.

It’s going to take time until they’re going to adjust, know the company and start to perform. And the turnovers are always the hardest part for any company in the world. And these days, especially, it seems like Money is not enough for the people. If it’s of course, it is very important, but it’s not enough anymore.

People looking for something bigger. They want to feel valid. They want to feel Special, and they want to have that, special connection and connection with the company, feel belonging, so it’s not, I don’t [00:13:00] think it’s, as it used to be previously, that it’s all about Making more money and getting a better career step we see actually a different situation than people, especially now people prefer to work from home they want to work remotely, they want to have more freedom sometimes even people look, quit their very good jobs and go to school.

To no word. Just because money is not enough anymore. They want something special. So I think companies have a hard time now with everything happening. And it’s not an easy task to keep your employees happy and to keep them, motivated and satisfied.

William Tincup: And this is it’s funny because we think we’ve historically thought of recognition as a way of engaging people. It’s oh, you’ve done a wonderful job. Here’s this thing. Here’s this token, here’s this gift, et cetera. And then, that’s grown [00:14:00] up through the years.

And some of those are pretty sophisticated. Some of them are really nice gifts. And some of them might even be personalized to the person. This is different than that. And it feels different than that in the sense of this is actually a part of your retention strategy. So looking at the lens of HR and and the folks in Total Rewards, this is actually a different game.

This is, yes, you’re going to engage them and and again, acknowledge them from a recognition perspective, but you’re going to give them something that they truly will remember. Like you’re creating a memory, which is far more lasting, which I think there’s more bang for the buck, if you will.

So for whatever your gifting budget was before, this is money. Better spent in, in creating memories and helping people create their own memories and memories that they want. So I guess that’s a, that’s something else that I really like about this strategy is they get to personalize if it’s bourbon tasting or whatever it is, [00:15:00] they get to personalize it.

I love that. If you don’t mind, you did give a couple of examples at the beginning, and I would like to explore those without like company names or anything like that, but just like examples of like, where you’ve seen people use this on the B2B side, and you just really liked the examples of the experiences.

Migle Rakauskaite: All right. Yeah. We recently had quite a big order from one of the companies unfortunately I cannot mention their name, but the company is operating worldwide. And they have departments and, headquarters it is in the United States, but they have departments all over the world.

And for them, it is pretty complicated and quite hard to manage all those people. It’s very big company and they have lots of people working for them and, those people have completely different needs. So if you’re going to buy all of them the new mug. Let’s say customized mug. It might [00:16:00] be a nice gift, but it’s probably not going to create memories or as we said life lasting feeling and all of them are very different.

So here comes Tingly. We sell a bundle of experiences. You can customize that collection. You can put your team’s picture on top of it. You can write your slogan instead of ours, if you prefer that. But inside that collection, in most of the collections, the recipient gets to choose from 400. till thousands and thousands experiences inside of it.

So that means, someone working in Italy might prefer a pasta cooking class. And someone, I don’t know, working in in, in somewhere in Asia, let’s say they prefer to get a spa experience.[00:17:00] It’s especially hard when companies are big and then they have lots of people working for them and those people have different needs.

So it’s hard to come up with one gift unless that gift is that flexible as Tingly. I

William Tincup: love that. Okay. When you, I would assume that Tingly, when you show people, especially as head of growth, you show people a demo, right? A software. What do you love to show people?

I’m asking you to pick your favorite thing in your software. I understand the difficulty of that, but like when you just know, when you get to this place in the software demo that you’re there, their eyes are going to light up because they’ve never seen anything like this.

Migle Rakauskaite: I think for people, it’s it’s really important once they understand the benefit of what Tingly can bring.

It’s a global product. It has lots of flexibility, lots of choices [00:18:00] for every taste, let’s say, it doesn’t have an expiration date. And this was especially important during COVID. Or, in general you are not framed to do that experience in one year or in two years, you can do it Whenever you like.

So this is the part, once people understand how flexible Tingly is, and once they understand what benefit it brings as connecting people, creating memories, creating happiness in overall it’s really when the companies or The decision makers, they, it seems like for them, it’s it’s a shift in their heads.

It seems like something, they got to know something really different. So I’m usually very happy about that part. I’m happy to tell them all the variations we can do. And, we generally do that. From the idea that [00:19:00] we want people just to be happy. So

William Tincup: I love that. Do do they when, especially, compared to historical rewards and recognition software, do they need this?

Do they need Tingly to be tied to or integrated with any other systems that they have?

Migle Rakauskaite: Oh, no. So no integration is needed. Basically the company makes the order. They choose the specific collection they want. Sometimes we make to do customizations. Let’s say if they say, okay, so we have lots of people working in India.

Could you please make sure that everyone gets to choose? Lots of, lots of different experiences. So sometimes we even, customize the collection in that way that we put more experiences in a particular area. And once they, they do, once we fully choose the collection we like, we make it fully customized and then we brand the [00:20:00] box and then we ship that worldwide with delivery options and CDN.

The recipients, in this case employees, get it and then they come to our website and you can not only buy Tingly collections on our website, but you can also redeem experiences on our website. So no additional, integration is needed. It’s pretty easy. We have a very good customer service. It always helps you a bit.

Easy booking online, and if you have any questions, they’re always, here to help. Yeah, I

William Tincup: love that last question. And it’s it’s about buying questions. The podcast is really trying to help practitioners understand what’s out there. Hey, tingly, the tingly’s of the world that are out there and also, how to buy.[00:21:00]

So some of the things that I ask routinely is just like great buying questions. What do you love to, on the B2B side, when you’re talking to a prospect what do you love to hear? What do you know? Okay, they get it. They understand what we do and they understand how this is different than things that they’ve potentially bought in the past, et cetera.

So what are some great buying questions that you love?

Migle Rakauskaite: You mean asked by the corporate? Okay. That’s an interesting question. I’m not really sure if I have that one but usually they already coming to the idea that I want something different for my employees. I want something different. I want for them to feel really appreciated and really valuable.

And I’m looking for that perfect solution, and especially, as I mentioned, if you have a big company, which is operated worldwide, they have different occasions, and they just [00:22:00] want to find that perfect solution. Yeah,

William Tincup: they’re looking for something special because the same old things pre COVID aren’t going to work with employees.

And so they want something different. And again, to your point, global, if they’ve got employees around the world, which now because of remote work most companies that pre COVID didn’t have employees around the world now do have employees around the world, which is great. But again, now that creates a different different thing, cause, cause now recognition in the way that we’ve historically looked at it it’s not just broken with stuff it’s also broken because we can’t do, we can’t, we couldn’t do this.

So I can see them asking you we need something different. We need something to engage and retain. We want to make sure that we recognize people, but ultimately we want to create experiences. Exactly. Exactly. I love it. Thank you so much for your time. This has been wonderful. I absolutely love what y’all do, and and it’s needed.

It’s, this isn’t a, [00:23:00] sometimes, oftentimes you’ll see software that’s kinda searching for a problem. This is a real problem that people are having especially in light of the great resignation, quote unquote. So great work, wonderful business, and thank you.

Thank you for coming on the podcast.

Migle Rakauskaite: Thank you so much, William. It was a pleasure.

William Tincup: Absolutely. And thanks for everyone listening to the use case podcast until next time.