Zari was created after my husband and I came back from a birthday party where the celebrant was gifted at least 25 birthday cakes. They made nice Instagram pictures but ended up just being shared with the guests to take home. While doing more research, we realized that cake gifting had become the norm because it requires little to no thought or effort. Following these discussions, my group of friends also decided we would simply gift each other cash gifts so everyone could purchase what they want rather than the uninspired yearly cake exchange.

These two experiences made us think of how we could solve the problem of uncreative gift-giving & the struggle for coming up with creative and convenient ways to gift your loved ones items/experiences they would appreciate. Receiving a Zari gift box should make you feel like the person who sent it put in that extra effort to make you feel special.

We finally decided to create a gifting app that would encourage people to gift in creative ways while keeping the process simple & seamless. How could we do that? Gift cards that would be beautifully packaged alongside unique physical gifts because emailing someone a gift card and showing up to a party empty-handed may not always be appropriate.

When it came time to choose a name for the app, I knew it had to echo the foundation of family, friendship & LOVE which translates to the relationship between myself and my kids. Zari combines my name and the names of my two boys which inherently drives the main mission of this company.