Recession fears aren’t hurting the wishlist and procuring app GoWish, which is seeing report 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 related adoption developments in earlier years, this yr has confirmed to be a breakout success. The app doubled the variety of customers from final yr, and it has been breaking data with lots of of hundreds of latest each 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.Ok. In its residence market of Denmark, the wishlist app has over 50% market penetration and over 3.5 million registered Danish customers.
Although as we speak it operates as a tech firm, GoWish has a novel origin story.
The app was initially launched in 2015 by the Danish-Swedish nationwide postal service PostNord as “Ønskeskyen.” (That’s Danish for “want 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 companion, CEO Mads Dahlerup. They spun it out as an unbiased tech firm and created a world model of Ønskeskyen (the app’s identify in Denmark and Norway).
“We is perhaps the primary state-founded tech platform to go international 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 pals, and for various events. Needs — or merchandise you should buy from on-line retailers — might be added on to your checklist by copying and pasting a URL, trying to find a product, or looking the inspiration feeds that function thousands and thousands of merchandise. While 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 yr 2024, that are being reinvested in its development. (GoWish declined to reveal its whole income.)
The corporate attributes its elevated adoption this yr to the advertising it’s been doing throughout Meta, TikTok, Google, and Snap. Snap even gave GoWish a shoutout on its This fall earnings name, because it’s been certainly one of Snap’s companion success stories.
“We’re excellent at optimising our advertising spends throughout digital platforms and that makes our international roll-out very efficient,” Ravn‑Sørensen mentioned.
The corporate will later increase its expertise with AI, however isn’t but sharing particulars about these plans.
“We have now a mission of ‘fixing gifting’,” famous Ravn‑Sørensen, including that GoWish needs to make “customers’ goals and desires come true whereas making double-gifting and returns a factor of the previous.” (The app lets household and pals reserve objects on customers’ wishlists so customers received’t obtain the identical reward from a number of folks.)
“But, on an extended trajectory, we wish to grow to be the ‘international genie’ of social procuring, that may predict future shopper developments throughout generations,” he mentioned.
The Copenhagen-based firm is at the moment a group of 90 and is backed by Capital D, a London-based non-public fairness agency that purchased one-third of the corporate in early 2025; the remainder is owned by the Danish VC Dotcom Capital.
GoWish is obtainable on iOS and Android and presents a Chrome extension so as to add objects to wishlists out of your pc.
