Sisters Lydia Harris (left) and Jessica Davidson founded luxury gifting company The Duo. Photo / Supplied
Jessica Davidson, one half of the Matakana-based sisters who founded The Duo, talks to the Herald about swapping her big job in the city for starting a luxury gifting business, allowing her to spend more
time at home with family.
What does your business do?
The Duo is designed to take away the stress of gift-giving. Using our honed eye for detail, we source bespoke gifts for clients big or small, crafting beautiful yet functional and thoughtful gifts tailored to fit any brief.
How does it work?
We offer our clients and customers two options. Either a very simple online journey to purchase, wrap and send gifts. We have incorporated a number of custom-built elements into our back end which makes our offering unique relative to the market. It means the buying journey is seamless and caters for all customer needs. You can buy for instance 20 different gifts, for 20 different staff, with each gift wrapped and the message bespoke to that person and you can do all of this in one transaction. Every other gift site you’d need to make 20 separate transactions to achieve this.
Alternatively, the other option is a completely bespoke, personalised service where we chat through the client’s needs and then, using our extensive network, we’ll either source or work with our artisans to design and make the perfect gift, right down to custom packaging and handwritten cards.
What was the motivation to start The Duo?
The initial motivation was life balance. We both had big jobs in the city, nannies spending more time with our children than we were and commuting from where our families live in Matakana – which was two hours a day in the car. We were missing key moments and milestones in our young children’s lives and while we both loved our jobs it was at the sacrifice of balance.
We’re both hard workers and ultimately the motivation of being able to…
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