Recession fears are not impacting the wishlist and shopping app GoWish, which is seeing record numbers ahead of the 2025 holiday season. The app, which has over 13.6 million registered users, recently had its best day yet when it reached number two on the U.S. App Store this past Monday.
While GoWish has seen similar adoption trends in previous years, this year has proven to be a breakout success. The app doubled its user count from last year and has been breaking records with hundreds of thousands of new daily users throughout the month of November.
In the United States alone, the app has nearly 6.2 million users, while it has around one million in the United Kingdom. In its home market of Denmark, the wishlist app has achieved over fifty percent market penetration with more than 3.5 million registered Danish users.
Though it operates as a tech company today, GoWish has a unique origin story. The app was originally launched in 2015 by the Danish-Swedish national postal service PostNord under the name Ønskeskyen, which is Danish for wish cloud. It began as a seasonal wishlist feature, but its founders saw potential for it to become something more significant.
In 2020, GoWish was acquired by Danish venture capital firm Dotcom Capital. The firm is owned by founder Casper Ravn‑Sørensen, who also serves as GoWish’s Chief Growth Officer, and his partner, CEO Mads Dahlerup. They spun the app out as an independent tech company and created an international version of the original Danish and Norwegian app. The founders note that GoWish may be the first state-founded tech platform to go global as a privately-owned scale-up.
Consumers use the app to create multiple wishlists for themselves, their family, and their friends for different occasions. Users can add products, or wishes, from online retailers directly to their list by copying and pasting a URL, searching for a product, or browsing inspiration feeds that feature millions of items. When ready to buy, a user can tap a button in the app to go directly to the retailer’s website.
The company has established around 65,000 affiliate partnerships and over 700 brand partnerships. Many of these brands are now adding GoWish buttons to their own websites. This business model has been successful, with the app seeing net profits after tax of 1.7 million dollars in its 2024 fiscal year. These profits are being reinvested into the company’s growth, though GoWish declined to disclose its total revenue.
The company attributes its increased adoption this year to marketing efforts across Meta, TikTok, Google, and Snap. Snap even highlighted GoWish on its recent fourth quarter earnings call as one of its partner success stories. The company’s leadership stated they are very good at optimizing marketing spends across digital platforms, which makes their global roll-out very effective.
The company plans to later augment its experience with artificial intelligence, though it is not yet sharing specific details about those plans. The mission of GoWish is to fix gifting by making users’ dreams and wishes come true while eliminating double-gifting and returns. The app allows family and friends to reserve items on a user’s wishlist to prevent duplicate gifts. On a longer trajectory, the company aims to become the global genie of social shopping, predicting future consumer trends across generations.
The Copenhagen-based company currently employs a team of 90 people. It is backed by Capital D, a London-based private equity firm that bought one-third of the company in early 2025. The remainder of the company is owned by the Danish venture capital firm Dotcom Capital.
GoWish is available on iOS and Android and also offers a Chrome extension for adding items to wishlists from a computer.