RedBalloon
 |
|
| Founded | 2001 |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Sydney, Australia |
|
Key people
|
Naomi Simson, Founding Director David Anderson, CEO Ken Boundy, Chairman |
| Parent | Big Red Group |
| Website | RedBalloon website |
RedBalloon is an online experience gift retailer based in Australia. It is considered the pioneers of experiential gifting in Australia and New Zealand and have been ranked in the Top 50 Employers by Business Review Weekly from 2009 to 2013. In 2012, it was No. 2 on Business Review Weekly's list of the 20 most popular places to work in Australia.
RedBalloon was founded in 2001 by Naomi Simson. Simson began the company out of her house with a $25,000 personal investment. She grew the company to forty six employees by 2011. The business concept was to sell experiences and memories rather than gifts. Simson launched the company from her home in Balmain, New South Wales. It was at the end of the dot-com era and she had a difficult time signing up businesses to list with the company. It was a total of two months and four days before the company sold its first experience gift, which resulted in a profit of $9 for commission on the sale.
The company began to grow six months after launch when it was contacted by Fuji Xerox about using the experiences available on the website as an incentive for its sales force. Companies such as Telstra, Westpac, Commonwealth Bank, and Qantas signed up shortly thereafter. The success of using the experiences for incentives led the company to create RedBalloon Corporate in 2004. From 2001 through 2012, it was reported that the company sold more than 1.7 million gift experiences. The company also reported a 40% growth in their 2012 financial year for overall transaction values. The company also sells experience gift cards in offline retailers such as Target, Big W, and Myer.
The company migrated their online infrastructure to cloud-based Amazon Web Services in 2013. The move was to manage peak traffic load which included $1Million in sales on Christmas Eve 2012. Prior to that time, the company used caching and had extra servers on standby to deal with peak loads of traffic to the site. The company also made its first external board appointments in 2013 when it appointed Richard England as Chairman of the Board and Scott Farquhar as a non-executive director.
Naomi Simson was CEO of the company until 2011 when she took a step back from the operational side of the business. In October 2013 RedBalloon delivered its two millionth experience. In 2015, Nick Baker was hired as CEO of the company and Ken Boundy became Chairman of the Board. RedBalloon went through a re-branding in late 2015, updating the company logo and website. David Anderson took over as CEO in 2017 after becoming the CEO of the newly formed Big Red Group, a holding company that became the parent of RedBalloon. Anderson purchased 50% of RedBaloon in 2017.
...
Wikipedia