Dana is a marketing and branding expert who has worked with many corporate firms before launching Deposit a Gift, and after becoming Chief Gifting Officer for her own company, she has never looked back. DAG is not only a great business idea for bringing convenience its users but is also very practical and logical.

Learn more about Dana and Deposit a Gift through her words:

Deposit a Gift is a cash registry site for all of life’s Big Events. With a traditional service, you sign-up at specific stores for the gifts you’d like to receive today. With Deposit a Gift, you build a registry based on what you’d like to save for in the future. Guests contribute monetary gifts that go into a personal account which you can access at any time. The cash is yours to use towards anything your imagination can conjure.

Here's a quick snapshot of how it works:

Users make gift registries just like people do with a traditional store registry, using a database of images or by clicking on a pre-made list. They can choose anything, from honeymoons to home down payments, from cribs to college funds. (Here’s a link to the Samples)

Guests choose a gift to purchase, finding the right price point for their budget. They are not actually buying the present, but it feels more personal than sending a check. The money gets deposited into the recipient’s Deposit a Gift account. (Here’s a link to the Video Demos)

When users are ready to spend the money, they cash-out in the form of check, VISA gift card or direct deposit.

As a bonus, we include a free customizable website for all the event details, be it a wedding, a baby shower or a graduation party.

I started the company because I wanted to simplify and modernize gift giving. Little has changed about registries since they were introduced in the early 1900s, but the way we live has changed significantly. People today need flexibility and cash gives them just that. There are no returns, no space constraints. People can spend the money where they want, when they want.

Before Deposit a Gift I worked in the Advertising world for nearly a decade on both the Agency and the Client side. My last job was at Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages as the Advertising Manager on Snapple and Motts. The opportunity to pursue my entrepreneurial dream came at a crossroads when I had been recently laid off, newly married and needed to decide on the next step for my career. Since we didn’t have kids or any other ties, I felt that it was an opportune time to take a risk. I call this my ‘Hands-On MBA’ and view this as an investment in both my career and our family. At worst I knew I’d learn a lot, and at best it would develop into a real job, which pleasantly, it has!

Not to sugar coat it, the transition was not necessarily easy. But since I didn’t need to quit a job to get started, it was really a matter of committing myself to moving forward versus looking for alternative employment. After about a month of due diligence, and also some interviews with other companies, I confirmed that Deposit a Gift was where I wanted to place my focus, and so the real work began.

Learning from my own experience getting married and doing the registry thing, I wanted to create a service that was more comprehensive than what I saw out there. To me, ‘comprehensive’ first meant that it could be used for all celebrations, not just weddings, and for any type of gift, not just for honeymoons. In the wedding world, I felt that there were a lot of people who might want to register for cash gifts towards more than more than just their honeymoon, like a home down payment, furniture or newlywed experiences. I also felt that occasions beyond weddings could use such a service. So I made sure that Deposit a Gift was made to work for all of life’s celebrations. Though our user-base is still weighted towards weddings, babies are a close second, and after that are graduations, special birthdays, charities and bar/bat mitzvahs.

People have even started using us for fund raising. In fact, some have combined birthdays and charities for kids, and had birthday parties with “no presents” policies so that if someone wanted to give a gift, they could contribute to the Deposit a Gift birthday registry whose proceeds would go to the charity of the child’s choice. It’s been fun to see users take advantage of our tools in ways we never imagined.

In the vein of being comprehensive, I wanted to make sure that Deposit a Gift could be a one stop shop for both user and guest. So another big point of difference is that we offer a free, customizable website for all the event details, as well as space on the registry page to list links to your other registries; even though those registries are not ours, at the end of the day we wanted to offer a service that made our users lives easier. In the wedding world this is known as the ‘wedding website’ and it a common tool in today’s weddings. But in the baby world having a free website for all your baby details, with room for pics and video is an innovation. And for any other event that someone might be having, its the perfect hub for all the party details and is way more than just an evite.

Lastly, we did everything we could to make set-up easy. We offer a variety of pre-made lists called ‘Rapid Registries’ that are organized by themes like travel, baby and home so that users can just pick the lists that suit their needs to quickly populate the registry; then all they need to do is edit it a bit to be personalized for them. Our unofficial motto is ‘fun, flexible and hassle-free’ and we have kept this in mind with every decision we’ve made about how to make the best service to suit the needs of our users.

PR and social media has proven most effective for us to-date, as well as Google Adwords.

I am a big fan of the author Barbara Kingsolver. Typically she writes fiction, but her recent non-fiction book “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” is amazing. It chronicles her family’s 1 year journey in living off the land. We are so disconnected from the natural cycle of life and understanding the harvest and times of year that foods are actually available. Since she is such a gifted story-teller it didn’t feel like a dry instruction manual — I was completely drawn-in and inspired and I learned so much. I can’t wait to have a house and my own garden.

I actually really love working from home now because I’ve created a lifestyle that works for me. As you’ll read in my advice, I really feel strongly about creating some sort of structure for your day. Until I had that I was all over the place. I still probably work too much and don’t have the best boundaries, but I also consider this the start-up phase and I know that you get out what you put in, so I’m willing to do that while I can.

Create structure for your day and stick to it: One of the hardest parts about being an entrepreneur is finding meaning in your day and not feeling all over the place. So the first goal, especially when you work alone from home as I do, is to find a way to create structure in your day. For me, I build everything around a mid-afternoon workout routine. It provides a ‘before’ and ‘after’ to my day, and also makes sure that I actually leave the house, see other people and get some exercise.

Create a mood board to drive the development of a strong Brand ID: Unless you have design skills, you are going to have to hire someone to help create your Brand ID. I think one of the greatest advertising tricks is to create a mood board, which is like a collage of images that, together, communicate a feeling of what you are trying to achieve. It is something visual that you can share with your designer (along with the creative brief) to provide direction. Sometimes visuals are better communicators than words, because they elicit feeling. And what’s nice is that as the designer provides you with different options, you can hold them up against the mood board as a filter to help identify the right one. I actually created one for my wedding design too, which you can see in this blog post.

Listen to your gut and be ready to be flexible: I always considered myself a very gut-oriented person, even before I started Deposit a Gift. In fact, I considered it one of my key personal features. So it actually amazed me how I was even sometimes derailed from listening to myself because of external things like a deadline I had created. That is not to say that it isn’t important to develop, and stick to, deadlines for oneself, but sometimes you need to be flexible and not let a self-imposed deadline push you into a decision that you know on a gut level may not be the right thing to do.