Finding a great gift shouldn't require a hundred tabs. But somehow, that's where we usually end up.

Pinterest. TikTok. Google. Instagram. Search after search for gift ideas for girlfriend, gift ideas for friend, gift ideas for colleague.

And what do you get?

30 things that may or may not have anything to do with the person you are buying for. Some aren’t even sold where you live. So you keep on looking. Open a new tab. Save another idea. And you're still no closer to figuring out what to actually buy.

We’ve been there more times than we want to admit.

Then on the other side of it.

"What do you want for your birthday?"

"I don't know. Whatever you want."

Great. Now we're both back where we began. And then we thought, there’s got to be a better way.

Actually, the first idea for Awwli was quite simple. We wanted to be able to describe the person we were buying for naturally. Something like:

I want to buy a gift for my friend. She enjoys taking pictures and cooking. Her birthday is coming up.

And don't just throw another generic list; help users find something that feels right.

That's the basic idea. But what surprised us was what we found when we started building it.

We found that finding the right gift is not really a matter of matching keywords. It's about understanding the person behind them.

If you are buying something for a coworker and they like pink, that does not mean you should buy them a pink toy.

Context is important. It matters who they are. Your relationship counts. The occasion does matter. The things they like don’t always tell the whole story.

So Awwli had to be more than just another search engine. It had to understand what you were saying to it, put that into context, and then help shape that into something useful.

That’s probably the bit we didn’t quite expect.
What began as a more straightforward method to search for gifts turned into something much more interesting: trying to figure out the person behind the gift.

Because the goal was never really just to find a present.
That fleeting moment when you see something, and think:

“Oh. This is good.” “Aww. Cute.”

"I think they're gonna like this.”

Hopefully someone else opens it later and feels the same.

That’s the feeling behind Awwli.

We're in the early days. We’ve got a lot more we want to explore, build, and learn on the way.

But for now, we're happy to have found a good starting point.