Meet Peggy & Willa | Co-Founders of Poppy Gifting

We had the good fortune of connecting with Peggy & Willa and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Peggy & Willa, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
Gift giving has the power to spark joy and ignite conversation, but it has become a bit of a lost etiquette. We found that ready-made boxes feel impersonal, and big-box retailers don’t feel special. So we started Poppy to revive the art of gifting with an intentional touch.

In our day-to-day personal lives, we’re big gift givers and have a passion for making our loved ones and acquaintances feel special. In our professional lives, we’re former sales leaders and marketers who leaned on gifting as an key piece of client development. Connecting with others is so important, and delivering meaningful gifts and joy is a great way to do so.

Given we couldn’t access the tailored style of gifting we were hoping for, we started Poppy. We figured if we were renting designer dresses, ordering a car service on demand, and tasking someone to pickup our groceries — why couldn’t we outsource our gifting shopping?

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
Our backgrounds overlap, we both started out in retail, at One Kings Lane for Peggy and Louis Vuitton for Willa. Then we both having spent time at notable marketing agencies based in San Francisco interacting with clients while supporting their growth strategies across creative, partnerships, influencer, email marketing efforts. We enjoyed fostering the client relationships and contributing to so many marketing objectives, each experience has lent itself to the many hats we where today.

Launching Poppy has been incredibly exciting to say the least, and certainly not always easy. The biggest lesson we’ve had to learn is that there is huge value and necessity in pivoting our service offerings to evolve, meet customers expectations, and continue to grow. Its imperative to listen to consumer feedback because your hypothesis does not always match the market response.

Among our competitors, Poppy stands out because we both celebrate the meaning and intentionality of gifting while also preserve the personal experience. Our questionnaire and gift catalog ensure that the gift recipient’s interests are the driver of our curation, and that the gift giver is fully involved in the gift selection process.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Well we’re based in San Francisco, so no trip is complete without a walk along Crissy Field to see the Bay and the beautiful Golden Gate Bridge. A few of our favorite restaurants include Cotogna, for the best ambiance and heart warming modern California Italian food, and Tartine Bakery, for some of most delicious croissants and baked goods you’ll ever eat! While there, pop into the Heath Ceramics shop next door and view their beautiful and handmade earthenware pieces. Don’t forget visits to the De Young and Legion of Honor museums to see some of the city’s landmarks, leading art collections, and stunning city views.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
We owe a lot of credit to Lydia Fenet and the motivation that we derived from her first book, The Most Powerful Woman in the Room is You. We’d met her in person at a book signing event, described our vision, and she said go for it! Her writing enabled us to realize that we are in control of our destiny, and with the right level of skill and curiosity we could make our dreams into reality. We further bonded over the confidence her book instilled in us, and here we are today a little over 4 years later still hard at work with that confidence in our sales.

Website: poppygifting.com

Instagram: Poppy Gifting

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/poppy-gifting

Image Credits
Allison Busch Photography Calista Wilson Styling