Recession fears aren’t hurting the wishlist and procuring app GoWish, which is seeing file numbers forward of the 2025 vacation season. The app, which has north of 13.6 million registered customers, had its finest day but this week, when on Monday it hit No. 2 on the U.S. App Retailer.
Whereas GoWish has seen comparable adoption developments in earlier years, this 12 months has confirmed to be a breakout success. The app doubled the variety of customers from final 12 months, and it has been breaking information with lots of of 1000’s of recent day by day customers within the month of November.
Within the U.S. alone, the app has almost 6.2 million customers, whereas it has round 1 million within the U.Okay. In its dwelling market of Denmark, the wishlist app has over 50% market penetration and over 3.5 million registered Danish customers.
Although in the present day it operates as a tech firm, GoWish has a singular origin story.
The app was initially launched in 2015 by the Danish-Swedish nationwide postal service PostNord as “Ønskeskyen.” (That’s Danish for “wish cloud.”) It was only a seasonal wishlist gimmick, however its founders noticed the potential for it to be one thing extra.
In 2020, GoWish was acquired by Danish VC Dotcom Capital, which is owned by founder Casper Ravn‑Sørensen, who can also be GoWish’s Chief Development Officer, and his associate, CEO Mads Dahlerup. They spun it out as an impartial tech firm and created a world model of Ønskeskyen (the app’s title in Denmark and Norway).
“We might be the first state-founded tech platform to go global as a privately-owned scale-up,” Ravn‑Sørensen advised TechCrunch.
Shoppers can use the app to create a number of wishlists for themselves, their household and mates, and for various events. Needs — or merchandise you should purchase from on-line retailers — might be added on to your listing by copying and pasting a URL, looking for a product, or shopping the inspiration feeds that characteristic tens of millions of merchandise. Once you’re prepared to purchase, you may faucet a button within the app to go on to the retailer’s web site.
The corporate has round 65,000 affiliate partnerships and over 700 model partnerships, a lot of which at the moment are including “GoWish” buttons to their very own web sites. This mannequin has been profitable, defined Ravn‑Sørensen, because the app noticed web earnings after tax of $1.7 million in its fiscal 12 months 2024, that are being reinvested in its progress. (GoWish declined to reveal its whole income.)
The corporate attributes its elevated adoption this 12 months to the advertising it’s been doing throughout Meta, TikTok, Google, and Snap. Snap even gave GoWish a shoutout on its This autumn earnings name, because it’s been one in all Snap’s associate success tales.
“We’re very good at optimising our marketing spends across digital platforms and that makes our global roll-out very effective,” Ravn‑Sørensen stated.
The corporate will later increase its expertise with AI, however isn’t but sharing particulars about these plans.
“We have a mission of ‘fixing gifting’,” famous Ravn‑Sørensen, including that GoWish needs to make “users’ dreams and wishes come true while making double-gifting and returns a thing of the past.” (The app lets household and mates reserve objects on customers’ wishlists so customers gained’t obtain the identical present from a number of folks.)
“Yet, on a longer trajectory, we want to become the ‘global genie’ of social shopping, that can predict future consumer trends across generations,” he stated.
The Copenhagen-based firm is at the moment a workforce of 90 and is backed by Capital D, a London-based personal fairness agency that purchased one-third of the corporate in early 2025; the remaining is owned by the Danish VC Dotcom Capital.
GoWish is offered on iOS and Android and provides a Chrome extension so as to add objects to wishlists out of your pc.
