Ralph Waldo Emerson was credited with saying, “build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.”  Even though his words were slightly different, the sentiment has become a metaphor for innovation.

That led me to the idea of gift giving and receiving.  I have always wondered why there wasn’t a better way for both.  I have looked over lists of popular gifts in search of seeing something I might do better or for gift giving inspiration.  With many of my closest friends, I had lost all originality.  But to my mind, in many ways, gifts and gift giving are more like fingerprints.   Everyone has there own individual wants and needs.  And gifting can be very personal.

Unfortunately, don’t we all think this way sometimes when we are opening a gift, but we never say it, “Same old thing” right?  And even when I am shopping for a gift for someone else, I sometimes think the same thing.  It is the gift giver blues.  I gift or worse re-gift many of the same old things because I do not know what to get a person.  Many of us really struggle with giving a gift, so if you are one of those who think that way, you are not alone.   And even if you do not think that way, aren’t we all sometimes disappointed when we get a gift that we really did not want.  I had always thought it was a shame that we couldn’t do a better job since we all want the same thing, a better way to give a gift and a better gift received.

So often it is the old fall back, money or a gift card.  We think, and rightly so, that a person should know themselves better than we could ever know them.  And still we want to go the extra mile and get them something more meaningful then money or a gift card.  It is part of our DNA.  It is part of our larger culture.

But the cold reality is we just aren’t that good at it, because we do not know enough about what someone else wants as a gift.  And that is true even with someone we are very close to because we can’t read minds.  There just was never a mechanism, a better mousetrap if you will, to know what we needed to know.

I have looked online a few of times in search of an answer to poor gift giving, and I never found anything that really helped me to give a gift.  And that was true until now.  When it comes to gift giving and gift receiving, the Penless way is amazing.  Talk about a better mousetrap.  This is the best gift giving mousetrap app I have ever seen.  It is really one of a kind.  No other app does more to support the gifting process.  And with Penless there is so much more meaning.  It gives a place in My Stuff to store your wish list and it even has an idea board for you to save ideas that are not necessarily intended to be a gift.  This is an idea board.  And because your wish list and idea board is all on the web, it will not clutter up the photo library on your phone.  The wish list can be shared and so can the sizes.   So I have my friend’s wish list and sizes accessible on my phone.  At least the items that they want me to see.

For me, gifting is so much more personal and it is so much more memorable because every gift is meant specifically for the recipient and every message is unique.