Business

Taking Christmas to Sandy’s victims

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One Rockaway native is using a startup gift-giving website to make sure kids in his Hurricane Sandy-devastated neighborhood have a merry Christmas.

San Diego-based executive James Brennan is helping to lead recovery efforts in Belle Harbor. But when he recently asked some local kids what they wanted for Christmas, their mother snapped, “They’re getting hot water and heat for Christmas.”

So Brennan turned to his friend Paul Buss, the chief executive of beta social-gifting website Ziftit, to help area kids get what they really want.

Buss reconfigured Ziftit so people could buy items ranging from clothes and toys to iPads and bikes for 300 Rockaway kids.

Just go to Ziftit.com and click on the “Buy a Gift for a Rockaway Kid” link. If the item isn’t wrapped, you can buy it on the retailer’s website via Ziftit’s link and enter the provided shipping address.

Yes, Christmas is right around the corner, but there’s still time to buy a present because Brennan is planning a special Rockaway Christmas for Jan. 25.

Ziftit, meanwhile, plans to launch for real in mid- to late January. The site plans to make gifting easy by allowing people to create their own wish lists and connect them — via Facebook, Twitter or e-mail — to people who might want to give you presents. They can then buy the items you want or contribute money toward them.

Once all the funds are raised for a particular present, the recipient can either buy that item through a single-use Ziftit Visa Virtual Gift Card or use that money to buy something else. Ziftit may even enable you to easily donate money to someone’s chosen charity.

Ziftit, which raised $2 million of a $2.5 million fundraising round in October, will be competing against Facebook’s Gifts and other gift-giving startups. But Buss claims that Ziftit will appeal to people getting presents because it’s more “giftee-driven.”

Ziftit will get a portion of the sale price for each gift purchased, but the site’s not taking any fees on the Rockaway project.

As for how that charitable effort will help Ziftit as it prepares to launch, Buss said, “I think people will see this, and they’ll be inspired to use this tool to do the same thing.”