Modern marketplace. New growth lever.

This $2B peer-to-peer fashion marketplace has sustained YoY double-digit growth and built a thriving digital community. Despite their scale and brand awareness, they didn’t offer a gift card until they met Totus. Why? They wanted to avoid compliance headaches, liability risk associated with holding cash, and operational overhead. When they were ready to pursue launching a gift card program, they needed a single partner to handle everything.

From RFP to turnkey launch

The brand came to Totus with a simple goal: launch a giftable product in time for holiday. They knew they didn’t want to hold liability, manage multiple vendors or overburden their tech team with a lengthy and resource intensive project. Totus provided a one-stop solution—compliance, issuance, payments, technology, distribution, and ongoing program management.

The partnership accelerated quickly. The RFP process took longer than the actual implementation. Within three months of kickoff, Totus delivered a First-Party digital gift card program with end-to-end wallet integration enabling our client to sell and redeem gift cards online and in-app. Totus seamlessly coordinated the transaction processor setup, ecommerce configuration, and customer service training allowing our client to focus solely on marketing the gift card to their customers.

Thoughtful implementation, fast results

Totus worked closely with a dedicated project manager and executive sponsor on the Client side. The team prioritized user experience, internal workflows, and go-to-market readiness as their key priorities which included:

1. First-party sales online and in-app: Launched in time for the holiday season, the brand drove over $600K in activations in December alone. In the first six months after the holiday, activations reached nearly $2 million and continue to grow
2. Promotions: Brand tested a “bonus card” campaign that offered an additional $10 card with the purchase of a $50 gift card, and an additional $20 gift card with the purchase of a $100 gift card delivering a 10x sales lift. Over 20% of buyers associated with the campaign were new customers to the brand.
3. Buy Now Pay Later: Brand launched in gift card mall catalogues hosted by Klarna, Sezzle, and Zip that have shown strong early growth, new customers and incremental revenue

Expanding into new channels

Given the success of their online and in-app gift card sales and promotions, and at the recommendation of the Totus team, the brand expanded into:

1. Third-party retail: Launched nationwide with the largest grocery chain in the US in Spring of 2025
2. B2B resellers: With Totus acting as the Category Manager and Brand advocate, the brand received dozens of placements within loyalty, rewards, and incentive programs.  The brand also launched a targeted campaign to reactivate lapsed customers that drove a 2,500x lift in gift card activations
3. The Totus team continues to advise the brand on where and how to scale distribution, how to acquire and retain new customers with gift cards, , and drive sales with promotions, across all distribution channels. These actions drive
4. Marketing events and giveaways
5. Social campaigns and customer service appeasement and recovery
6. Employee incentives and brand awareness

The brand continues to double down on the gift card program by assigning an internal resource dedicated to champion the use of gift cards across the organization, solidifying gift cards as a strategic marketing tool in the brands continued growth. And they continue to rely on Totus to drive the roadmap: when to promote, where to grow, and how to optimize.

"They trust us to lead the strategy—and we see them executing more and more on their own. That’s what success looks like." – Amanda Nipper, Client Success

A case study in brand-first growth

This brand didn’t treat gift cards as a side project. They treated them like a product. That mindset—combined with Totus' full-service model—turned a delayed program into a fast-scaling revenue engine.