An April Fool's Joke That Became a 17-Year Corporate Gifting Business

Who built it, and what they built

Srikanth Acharya is the CEO of OffiNeeds, a corporate gifting and custom merchandise company headquartered in Bengaluru with additional offices in Hyderabad and Chennai. The company has operated for more than 17 years and counts over 2000 large corporate clients.

Its core offerings include white-labeled online stores that sell a company's branded merchandise to its own staff, welcome kits for new hires, occasion-based gift microsites where employees pick from a shortlist of options shipped to their homes, and a voucher platform covering more than 100 gift card brands.

Where the idea came from

In 2005, while working as a software developer at Infosys, Srikanth played an April Fool's prank on colleagues, announcing he would quit to start a business. Pressed for details, he named corporate gifting, an idea seeded weeks earlier when a friend in apparel noted how valuable the Infosys T-shirt order must have been for its vendor.

Colleagues kept asking how he would find clients and source products, and by answering them he had effectively drafted a business plan. Within weeks he resigned and started the company for real, reasoning that with no loans and modest skills as a developer, failure would just mean finding another job.

How they built the first version