GoWish on Stamps, Wishlists, and the Power 100

GoWish has an origin story that's hard to beat.  

The platform started life as a project by the Danish postal office, built to sell more stamps. A decade on, it's grown into the go-to inspiration and wishlist platform for gift-giving.  

Headquartered in Denmark, where it's known locally by a name that translates to "the wish cloud" (hence the cloud logo), GoWish is now scaling fast across Europe and the US. 

Awin advertisers can use the app to reach into high-intent audiences well before the point of purchase. Indeed, where a lot of Power 100 partners pitch themselves as bottom-of-funnel, built to drive sales right now, GoWish sits further upstream. Its wishlists surface genuine purchase intent many weeks before a sale happens. 

The platform has grown from around 3 million US users a year ago to 9 million by the end of last year, with a target of 14-15 million by the end of 2026. 

It's also a member of the Awin Power 100: a showcase of the 100 most innovative partners on the Awin platform network. 

At ThinkTank Americas 2026, we sat down with Christian Holmgaard, Affiliate Partnerships Manager at GoWish, for a long overdue catch-up. 

View Christian's full interview above, or check the write-up below. 

Christian, congrats on making the Power 100! Tell us a bit about GoWish. 

GoWish is the go-to place for gift, anything gift-related, actually. It's the place you go when you have a birthday coming up. My family has asked me a million times over the years, "hey, what do you want for your birthday?" and I always got nothing. I really wanted to solve that problem with a lot of inspiration in the app, so you can go in and just browse a lot of stuff. 

For example, we have our gift generator, where you go in and type, "I'm turning 32, I'm a guy," and then I can see what other guys my age are wishing for. Or if I need to get a gift for someone else, I can pick "woman, 20" and find a good gift for them. So it's really become the go-to place to find gifts, and then also to save them and send your list to others. They can reserve the item so you don't get it twice, and all that good stuff. 

So how did it all start? How was the company founded, and what were the early beginnings? 

It's actually a 10-year-old company, originally from Denmark. We have a local name, it translates to "the wish cloud," which is also why our logo is a cloud. It was actually started by the Danish postal office, as I've been told, as a way to sell more stamps. Don't ask me why, but that was apparently the reason, and it gained massive popularity from the start. 

Our now-owners, two entrepreneurs, bought it from the Danish postal office and developed it a lot further. It started only being a wish list, just posting the stuff you wanted, but it turned into this whole inspiration platform that we really focus on now.  

Actually, most of the wishes created in our app are coming from the stuff that we recommend. So it's come a long way from just being a wish list platform, evolving over the years. 

You're not trying to get people to buy right now. So what does that conversion window look like? 

When someone saves something to a wish list, what we normally see is that the gap from a wish being created to a conversion is, in general, 4-8 weeks. That gives us a lot of intent data to give our advertisers.  

They can look at the wish statistics and try to spot trends. All of a sudden, they can see that "oh, these shoes are starting to take off," or "a lot of 20-year-old guys are starting to wish for this or that", and then they can increase spend on other platforms, targeting that exact product to that exact audience. 

Over that 4-8-week window, it also tells us a lot about the future. Most of the data advertisers can get is about right now or the past, whereas the wish list holds the future. They can go in, check the wish statistics, and see what's going to sell in a couple of weeks.  

A lot of our advertisers use that to predict demand and make sure they have enough stock. They can forecast a bit better than they normally could. 

Forecasting is always a big challenge in itself, and this gives a sense of future trends as well, which is great. What do the future plans look like for GoWish? 

First, in terms of users, we're constantly investing a lot in growing. About a year ago at this point, we were maybe at 3 or 4 million users. By the end of the year, we were at 9 million users in the US. We want to see that same huge growth this year. Hopefully we'll be at 14 or 15 million by the end of it. So we're investing heavily in that. 

In terms of the platform, we keep doubling down on what we're seeing works really well. For example, the gift generator I mentioned: every time we see something that has huge interest from users, we explore what else we can try.  

Once in a while we launch something new in the app. We're looking at things like a swipe-card format, similar to what you'd see on Tinder, as a way of presenting products to users, and I recently saw some new sketches of how the app might look in a few months. It's just constantly making sure we have the user in focus, inspiring them more and better than we're doing right now, learning what really performs well, doubling down on that, and trying new things. It's actually quite exciting. 

Strike up a partnership with GoWish, or browse the Power 100 for influencers, tech partners, coupon sites, and more.