Editor’s note: Today’s conversation features Alex Ingram, founder of Zest, a company building software to help e-commerce brands grow and operationalize their corporate gifting channel.

Alex brings a unique operator perspective to the problem. Before starting Zest, he was one of the first eight hires at Flatiron Health, the healthcare data platform that sold to Roche for over $2bn. That experience shaped how he thinks about building workflow software that actually gets adopted inside organizations.

At Zest, Alex is applying that same mindset to a category most e-commerce infrastructure was never designed to support. Traditional checkout systems are optimized for single buyers purchasing for themselves. The moment companies try to send gifts to dozens or hundreds of recipients, the process quickly turns into spreadsheets, manual coordination and operational overhead.

There are strong lessons here for buyers and operators around hybrid pricing models, building on top of existing systems rather than replacing them, and what disciplined experimentation looks like inside an early-stage software company.

As always, let us know what you think and please reach out if you have feedback.

- Dave

E-commerce brands know the problem: checkout systems are optimized for individual purchases, not gifting.

Sending gifts to multiple recipients often means spreadsheets, repeated checkout flows and manual coordination between brands and gifters.

That’s where Alex Ingram [LinkedIn] and Zest come in. Zest is software built for e-commerce brands that want to grow their corporate gifting channel while keeping their existing e-commerce stack intact.

In this conversation, Alex dives into:

• Why traditional e-commerce checkout breaks down for gifting workflows
• How Zest sits as a layer on top of Shopify and other e-commerce platforms
• The three main corporate gifting use cases: employee, client and sales gifting
• Why gifting economics require a hybrid pricing model (subscription + usage)
• How experimentation inside Zest led to launching (and ultimately shutting down) a marketplace initiative

Introductions & Origins

Dave Ambrose (01:03)

What is Zest, what have you built and what problem are you solving?

Alex Ingram (01:12)

What Zest is is a set of software sold to e-commerce brands.

We help brands like Levain Bakery, Brightland Olive Oil and Graza grow their gifting channel.

The typical e-commerce checkout today has really been optimized for someone buying something for themselves.

But for brands with giftable products, they’ve remained underserved by the typical e-commerce checkout.

For example, if I wanted to send a bottle of Brightland olive oil to several friends, I would have to check out multiple times in a row, entering my credit card each time.