How Caroo achieved $1M in top-line growth after integrating with Tremendous

The highlight reel

—> Caroo is an employee recognition platform that makes it easy for employers to identify and send the ideal gift for work anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, and other milestones.

—> Before Tremendous, Caroo largely specialized in physical gifts. In 2022, they wanted to include on-demand gifting for the first time, like digital gift cards that employees can receive and use immediately.

—> They opted to integrate with Tremendous over several other vendors. Caroo was drawn in by Tremendous’ robust international catalog, unique approach to partnership, and straightforward API.

—> “Now, we can win organizations that want to send physical gifts, and those that want to get a digital gift card in their employee’s inbox immediately.”

The problem

Caroo has nailed the delicate art of employee gifting.

The employee recognition platform includes in-depth personality assessments that help employers and HR teams uncover the kinds of gifts their employees like and dislike, data-driven tips on the most effective ways to reward different kinds of people, and hundreds of gift options, from handwritten notes and food delivery to gift cards and self-care bundles.

In 2022, though, digital gift cards and monetary rewards weren’t part of their extensive suite of offerings. Physical gifts were their bread and butter.

But the team wanted to make sure employers ordering last-minute birthday or holiday gifts had options that would reliably land in their employee’s hands within a day, or even minutes. Something they could receive use right away.

“For some people, they feel it’s really important for a birthday gift to land physically in the employee’s hands on their birthday, and not a couple days later,” said Jake Moser, former Director of Product at Caroo.

“We wanted a way to make sure employees could have a digital gift card in their inbox immediately.”

The trial

Caroo assessed a few different vendors in their search for the right integration partner.

Some only provided gift card options that worked in the US and Canada. Other vendors were more focused on negotiating a favorable deal than forging a true partnership.

When he found Tremendous, Jake knew the relationship would be collaborative from the first conversation.

“Tremendous has been looking at this very much from the standpoint of partnership.”

Jake opted to launch a six-week trial with Tremendous to test the platform before implementing a full integration.

“We did basically a very low-code test with manual strings being pulled on the backend,” said Jake. “But to our customer, it looked like we had launched gift cards.”

The test far exceeded expectations. Customers loved the option to send digital gift cards. As the team analyzed their data, they realized that adding gift cards to Caroo’s catalog of rewards brought in over 75% net-new revenue.

“The test really drove the prioritization of a more full integration because of its success.”

One simple integration. Hundreds of new customers.

When it came time to build an integration with Tremendous, Caroo found it was painless.

“We essentially assigned one engineer to engross himself in the API docs,” said Jake. “As we did the initial integration and added additional features over time, he was our go-to guy.

In a matter of weeks, Caroo was up and running with Tremendous.

“It was seamless,” Jake said. “After we launched the integration, we started seeing more spend on the platform pretty quickly.”

The outcome

Within a year, Caroo achieved significant revenue growth.

“Now, we can win companies that want to send physical gifts, and those that want to get a digital gift card in their employee’s inbox immediately.”

And there are a lot of businesses who want to be able to offer digital gifts to their employees. In just a short time, Jake had plenty of data to prove the ROI of the integration.

“We did $1M in virtually all new business in the first twelve months.”

This explosive top-line growth helped Caroo raise more money from investors, which fueled further growth for the business.

“Tremendous has been able to accommodate pretty much everything that we’ve asked for along the way,” said Jake.

Want to integrate with Tremendous? Chat with our team to partner with us, or check out our API docs.