Holiday Gift Givers Value VoiceQuilt's Sentimental Group Gifts

Sentimental Gifts Top All Others This Holiday Season

Survey by VoiceQuilt highlights nationwide trends

ATLANTA –November 21, 2006 – The 2006 VoiceQuilt Trends in Gift Giving Report, a recent nationwide survey of the gift-giving motivations of adult women, sponsored by VoiceQuilt (www.voicequilt.com), shows December religious holidays (Christmas, Kwanza, Hanukkah) are among the favorite gift-giving occasions for U.S. women (60 percent). Group gift giving is widespread, as is the desire to give the gift of “voice memories.” Fifty-three percent said they are very likely to give a group gift for a December holiday.

“Ninety-two percent say ‘sentimental’ is the most important attribute of a gift,” said Hope Flammer, founder of VoiceQuilt. “Gifts that are personal and sentimental are very important among female gift givers who want to provide a meaningful, one-of-a-kind experience for the recipient.”

Holiday Gift-Giving
Women give the most gifts for December holidays. Fifty-one percent give nine or more gifts during the month. Twenty-four percent of respondents said Dad was the hardest person to shop for, while children are the easiest according to 47 percent.

Two heads are better than one
Group gift giving is very popular. Fifty-one percent of women nationwide say they were part of a group gift in the last 12 months and 70 percent of those gave group gifts more than once.

A gift worth more than a thousand words
Gifts that are personalized with voice recordings are very desirable: 72 percent of women say that if they could give the gift of “voice memories,” such as a child talking to a grandparent or a special message for a recent graduate, they would.

Flammer added, “This idea of preserving memories strongly resonates. Women value sentimental gifts and this is one of the reasons I founded VoiceQuilt. Our goal is to make it easy to collect voice-based memories – and to safeguard them in heirloom-quality keepsakes.”

Camera-ready graphs of the 2006 VoiceQuilt Trends in Gift Giving Report are available by contacting Julie Herron Carson at (404) 285-3434 or at jhcarson@bellsouth.net.

About VoiceQuilt
VoiceQuilt is a collection of personalized recorded messages from family and/or friends preserved in hand-crafted keepsakes – or shared electronically. www.voicequilt.com (678) 424-6597. Spoken memories preserve family history as an audio scrapbook. Soaring interest in genealogy and family reunions makes it easy for families to fill the VoiceQuilt box with memorabilia that complements the recorded memories,” said Flammer.

Contact: Julie Carson, (404) 285-3434, jhcarson@bellsouth.net