For your next gift, send a catalog you curated.
Wantful lets you give the gift of choice--by sending someone a customized, 16-item catalog of gifts to choose from.

Here’s how it works: You visit the site (which is exceedingly sharp and easy to use, reaffirming your sense that this is indeed going to be a Good Gift), tell it a little bit about the gift you need (who you’re buying it for, their gender, and a dollar amount you’re looking to spend, from $30 to $500), and answer a few questions about the recipient (which of these style homes would so-and-so like to live in; does so-and-so like cooking, etc). The site then spits out a nice clean grid of product thumbnails algorithmically picked for your recipient, culled from an inventory of a few thousand items. The products include neat bracelets, artsy coffee table books, cool candle holders--a lot of stuff you’d expect to see in New York’s Museum of Modern Art Design Store. Kitchen gizmos are very prevalent. Anyway, you pick sixteen of these products, and Wantful puts them into an elegant little catalog, sends it to the recipient, and lets them choose one to have as their own, courtesy of your credit card.

It’s clever. A book from Wantful combines the "this way you can get something you like" guarantee of a gift card and the lasting usefulness of a genuinely cool product. But as the site’s founder and CEO John Poisson told Co.Design, it also carries with it that central Good Gift component: surprise.