Bullets For Your Valentine (Fired from the Internet)

Monday February 06, 2012 , 4 min Read

Bullet Points that might help you decide what to gift on Valentine's Day

We’d all want every day to be a Valentine’s day but reality always has an interesting take on things. This makes it mandatory for us to earmark a day for love. So, Valentine’s Day will always remain a day when hearts pound hard and so do the ring of the cash register (now replaced by data packets over the internet). With only a week to go before V-Day, one must have a fair idea about what he/she would be turning up on the big day.

Lovers will gift flowers and chocolates till the times we run out of cocoa or something goes terribly wrong with pollination but with the advent of the internet, there are a gazillion other things to spruce up your love life. Here are some of the options followed by the ever green red options.

Players like Shopo.in who have been piquing enormous interest come with a unique offering for Valentine’s Day wherein they add a lot more meaning to a gift. Shopo has an interesting serivce wherein Love Guru Aisha would be online in the evenings to suggest gifts." We're celebrating the season of love which started from January 20 and we're seeing amazing response which was very much expected. Usually it's a wee bit difficult for girls to find something for their men but we have a special offering this time around exclusively for men as well", says Krithika Nelson, founder at Shopo.
Sites like Vouchersmate also have an interesting offer. "Our Valentine catalog for 2012 is exclusive greeting cards collection with selected flower bouquets and range of gift vouchers from top brands, a complete gift box for everyone you love and care" informs Amit, Founder Vouchersmate.
And if you for some reason you don't believe in gifts, you can do something special like go for a desert making workshop! This, if you happen to be in Bangalore, can be done at Chaipatty.

And if your hormones within have started whispering about how experimenting can ruin it sometimes, here's a more conservative list.

Flowers

The world's flower trade is pegged at $100 billion which makes it very easy to believe that the first thing that would crop up in one's mind when one picture Valentine ’s Day is a red rose (and a heart). You can always get a red rose on any other day but if you’ve woken up too late, you would be lucky to find a rose stem which could signify the purity of your love. Be prepared and get your flowers before hand from the likes of FernsNPetals.
A TOI report says the highest price that a rose could fetch was Rs 36 last year. But the quality of these roses which have been stored and treated for the special day (to fetch rosy prices) is contentious.

In this age where every Romeo, Laila and Majnu knows about the buzzword- innovation, flowers don’t fit in the bill. it always works as an accompaniment, but you need a plan A.

Perfumes

The market for perfume in India is huge now where a luxury mall can expect to do a sale of Rs 50000 on a normal day. And a well informed decision about a fragrance can definitely earn oneself some brownie points wherein the polished connoisseur part of you is to be showcased.

There are a number of e-commerce companies like Perfume2order catering to this need where you can find perfumes from a Chanel to a Nina Ricci.

Perfumes might burn a few holes in the pockets but it definitely mends the heart.

Chocolates

The chocolate market in India is Rs 2000 crore as of 2011 in which Cadbury has 70% and Nestle has 25% of the market share!
But the dark horses (or the chocolates) in these race are the ‘home made chocolates’ which are no longer only made in homes but have a very high gift value.

Many ventures including startups like Chocofthetown have special packages for Valentine’s Day which see huge business.

Lingerie

A bold option but for a fast moving India, certainly a hot topic with e-commerce players like Zivame and MyLace doing really well.

The discounts for the Valentine's season are as high as up to 85% which would surely be enticing. And the other plus here is that both the parties involved would benefit so this might be the option worth trying.

Zivame founder Kapil Karekar says, "We started the campaign in the third week of January and the response has been overwhelming!"

Here is a compilation of the websites mentioned in the article (the list is solely an indicator to the possible service providers in the various segments):

FernsNPetals , Perfume2Order, ChocOftheTown, MyLace, Zivame, Shopo, Vouchersmate and Chaipatty.