A Coveted Award in Entrepreneurship, Accepted from the Field in Ethiopia

Of all the weeks for our CEO Laura Hertz to win the most prestigious award of her career, it happened to be the one week she couldn't be there to accept it.

Laura had just been named USC's 2026 Alumni Entrepreneur of the Year by the Marshall School of Business and the Greif Center — an honor previously given to Steve Jobs, Howard Schultz, and Snoop Dogg. The ceremony was set for the same week she and Chief Impact Officer Jenise Steverding were supposed to be on the ground in Ethiopia, visiting the cause partners and communities behind the gifts and charitable contributions we help our customers send every day.

We're a bootstrapped company, mindful of our responsibility to make our resources go as far as they can to do as much good as possible. We don't allocate budget to send people into the field often. When these trips happen, they matter—not in an abstract "it's good for morale" way, but in a very concrete way.

Sitting across from the women at Parker Clay's workshop, meeting people from the communities where newly installed water pumps provide safe water, seeing the actual faces behind a line item on an impact report—that changes how you run a company. It sharpens decisions. It makes the work feel less like commerce and more like what it is.

Laura had a choice: stay at home in Los Angeles for one of the biggest professional honors of her career, or keep the trip that took months to plan and might not come around again for a while.

She went to Ethiopia, recording her acceptance video in a family member's back yard the day before she flew. It wasn't really a hard decision—but it was a real one. And honestly, it captures something about how we try to operate that's easier to show than to explain.

Laura's road to Gifts for Good didn't start with a business plan. It started with a hazmat suit. Before graduate school, she served in AmeriCorps—working at a Sacramento food bank in 115-degree heat, teaching in inner-city Los Angeles, and rebuilding homes in post-Katrina New Orleans with Habitat for Humanity. The work was unglamorous and urgent. It planted something.

After AmeriCorps came Deloitte, where Laura saw the other side of corporate life: expensive branded gifts that nobody wanted, headed straight for the landfill. The disconnect was hard to ignore. Companies were spending real money on swag that created zero value for anyone—not the recipient, not the community, not the planet.

Then, in 2014, a cancer diagnosis changed everything. Not the idea itself—but the urgency behind it. Life got shorter, and the question got sharper: what are you going to build with the time you have?

The answer came at USC Marshall, where Laura and co-founder Jerry Eisenberg turned a class project into a company. Their professor gave them an A. Nearly a decade later, the company is still going strong, and recently hit the milestone of $5,000,000 raised for charitable causes.

The corporate gifting industry is worth over $100 billion a year. Most of that spend disappears—into generic gift baskets, forgotten branded mugs, and desk drawers that never get opened.

Gifts for Good's model works differently. Every product is ethically sourced from one of 70+ cause partners—nonprofit organizations and social enterprises that create real outcomes for people and the planet. Every purchase generates tracked, verified impact across six cause categories: caring for children, saving animals, supporting job creation, protecting the environment, improving human health, and empowering women.

Since 2017, Gifts for Good clients have collectively helped plant over 1.6 million trees, fund more than 696,000 weeks of safe drinking water, provide nearly 684,000 meals, and support over 261,000 hours of dignified employment.

We'll be honest: awards are amazing to receive, but they are the kind of thing that feel bigger inside a company than outside of it. We know that.

But there's something worth saying about what Laura will come back with from Ethiopia—and it isn't a trophy. When you're a small company, it's easy to get buried in the day-to-day: logistics, inventory, client deadlines, the next quarter. A trip like this pulls you back to the reason the company exists. You see the workshop where women are building careers, not just products. You see the community that has clean water today because a corporate client chose a different kind of gift last year. That's fuel. Not the inspirational-poster kind—the practical kind. The kind that makes you pick up the phone on a hard Monday and keep going.

The Greif Center honors entrepreneurs who build companies that create lasting value. For us, that value lives in the Parker Clay workshop in Ethiopia, the Would Works studio in Los Angeles, or the Water for Good communities that have clean drinking water today that they didn't have yesterday. Laura was in the right place.

She put it well in the video she recorded for the ceremony:

"People always say: find your passion. I'd say something different. You don't find your passion. You build it."

She's still building.

Every Gifts for Good purchase supports cause partners creating verified impact—from reforestation to meals for children to employment for communities in need. If your company is ready to turn gifting into something more meaningful, we'd love to help.