Toggle

Toggle was born in 2018, and it wasn't founded by me alone. It was the whole team.

Gifting had lived inside Airship, and we decided to carve it out as its own product because we believed there was a market for a proper gifting platform. At the time, gift cards in hospitality were either done on paper or wrapped up in big-operator formats that most businesses couldn't touch.

The idea was pretty simple: let an operator build a gift card store, attach a payment provider, and be selling and redeeming gift cards within thirty minutes.

We moved around eight customers over from Airship, took our funding in 2019, and had about 40 customers live as we tripped into the pandemic.

Then lockdown hit. I wrote a LinkedIn post saying I wouldn't be beaten by any bloody pandemic, and we offered the platform for free. What followed was the hockey stick: £5.8m in gift card sales that year, for hospitality businesses whose doors were closed.

Customers pivoted with us. Many moved into home products, and Crust Bros used Toggle to feed the NHS. It was emotional, a bit of a roller coaster, and it laid the groundwork for what became an engine of growth.

Toggle has grown year on year ever since, and so has the customer base. Today around 700 brands use the product across some 6,000 locations, including some very well known high street names who trusted us with their gifting.

A real success story, and one that couldn't have been achieved without an incredible team. Kudos to Andrew Whiteley, Oskar Smith, Julian Cole, Georgina Doyle, Lorna Fox, Allyson Kitamura, Dave Wales, and everybody else involved in the launch of Toggle.