Winner of the LUXlife The Perfect Gift Awards 2022: Best 30+ Artisanal Gifts - South East Asia

by Marielle Reussink

2020 and 2021 were challenging. To support small companies maximise sales over the holiday season, we created the holiday marketing solution The Singapore Wishlist.

Today, I want to share with you what made us launch this marketing solution for artisanal businesses in Singapore, as well as the results achieved:

Why this initiative?

Through many conversations with different brands, we realized companies were looking for new ways to make the most of the festive season. At the same time, for consumers there seemed to be a greater desire to support local businesses than ever before.

I love Christmas and I’ve always been passionate about supporting local businesses. However, they’re not always easy to find - especially when you’re like me strapped for time.

So, despite this desire to buy local, the challenge remains for small businesses: how do you actually reach enough people to make your mark when you can’t just rely on traditional retail stores, the annual fairs and your digital marketing isn’t reaching a wide enough audience?

To help artisanal brands seize this opportunity and make it easy for customers to support businesses in their community, we launched The Singapore Wishlist. From a basic initial idea, it grew into a new online destination with multiple categories to find thoughtful, locally sourced gifts and holiday related services from independent brands.

For many of us, this would be a first Singapore Christmas. With our specially curated Wishlist, we also wanted to make it easy for you to find those unique holiday finds and great gift ideas from the comfort of your own sofa and to take the guesswork out of your Christmas shopping.

From handmade gifts, luxury styling services, decorations, fashion, beauty, gift ideas for the foodie or wine lovers in your life and so much more, you could find it on The Singapore Wishlist. Every product and service we selected was ready to gift and perfect for the festive season. All brands were carefully chosen - with quality you can trust.

Results and impact:

The Singapore Wishlist was more than just a website. It was a whole digital marketing campaign leveraging Facebook, Instagram and Google Ads. Our promise was to reach at least 150,000 people with our ads over the course of 2 months.

We’re excited to share that from November to December 2020, we not only managed to achieve our goal but we actually exceeded it by 29%! Not only that, but we also achieved an overall average Click-through Rate of 4.4% on our ads (a typical benchmark is 1 - 2%) and clients with a compelling offering reported a return on investment of 3.5. The Singapore Wishlist was also featured on Expat Living and on the Facebook Group Expat Lah.

The campaign was also recognised as part of the LUXlife The Perfect Gift Awards 2022.

Best 30+ Artisanal Gifts - South East Asia

We were so proud of this achievement and the collection of beautiful gifts and services that came together to brighten the Christmas period. It was wonderful working with such a diversity of wonderful businesses to curate this collection. Here’s a sneak peak:

We’re also happy that we got to support a good cause by featuring The Season for Giving catalogue by Her Rise Above, helping a selection of female-led home based businesses specialising in baking and creating special handmade gifts boost their orders and find new customers.

We hope you loved it too! Let us know your thoughts in the comments and whether we should bring it back next year!

Marielle Reussink

Founder of The Emms, Marketing Professional, Entrepreneur & Advisor to Start-ups

Follow me: LinkedIn | Medium