The OvationBox - Delivering Gratitude

In Peace Class today, I mentioned my Smile File to a group of third graders. One of them asked if they could see it. Well, it's not really a file so much as a dozen or so large manila envelopes filled with smiles, happiness, and love that students have shared with me over the past fourteen years. Wouldn't it be nice, I mused, if these notes of affirmation were somehow more organized for me? Enter OvationBox.

From the Press Release:

OvationBox - Delivering Gratitude

Kickstarter campaign wants to brings letters of love and appreciation to your mailbox

Montreal, Quebec – OvationBox collects letters of love and appreciation from the most important people in your network and delivers them on typewritten cards in a beautiful gift box.

The idea is to provide recipients of this unique gift with a source of constant love and encouragement from their closest family and friends - a standing ovation that, once opened, never stops delivering the applause they deserve.

“It’s the most personal gift you could ever receive,” OvationBox co-founder Colin Belyea says. “OvationBox is a simple concept, but each individual box holds an entire history of love and friendship.”

“No other gift can appreciate in value over time like gratitude can,” co-founder Alex Curtis says. Their Kickstarter campaign gets underway on March 4 to help fund OvationBox’s first shipment. After the campaign, the box opens. When an OvationBox is purchased, each customer is given a unique weblink to send to up to twenty of the recipient’s closest friends and family. The link allows them to contribute a short letter of love, gratitude or appreciation to that person's OvationBox. These letters are personally collected, printed, packaged and shipped in custom boxes by Belyea and Curtis.

“It was really important for us to do something physical,” Belyea says. “We rely so heavily on digital and social media interactions these days that people often lose the feeling of warmth in their interactions with the people closest to them. Over time, it makes us sadder.”

“I can recall and have saved every personal letter or package I’ve ever received. There are few things as genuinely thrilling as seeing a package left in your mailbox. Combine that feeling with the excitement of hearing from close friends and family and I imagine it will be truly elating,” Curtis says.

Belyea and Curtis hope to raise $10,000 to begin producing OvationBoxes and to simultaneously publish a blog that echoes the sentiments of their product.