Vivid helps us every day with effective, efficient cash-flow management. It lets us plan the commitments and the investments we have to make calmly, and at the same time earn a return on the capital we have in the account at that moment.
Nicolò Daniele Donato, Founder & Managing Director, Deluxy
The order comes in online. What arrives at the door is a person in white gloves carrying something made for one recipient and no one else: a cake made by a local artisan, three hundred red roses, a card written the way the sender asked. Deluxy has been doing this since 2019, and today it operates in Milan, Rome, Florence and New York, handling gifting worldwide through dedicated services. Half its business is private customers, half is services for companies.
Behind that sit twelve employees, more than fifty trained valets and over a hundred local artisans — and a business whose money goes out and comes in on very different timetables. Around a year ago, Deluxy moved part of its day-to-day finances onto the fintech platform Vivid.
The gap at the end of the counter
The idea did not start with logistics. It started behind the counter of two of the most recognisable names in jewellery, where Nicolò Daniele Donato was working when he saw what the market could not do.
The idea came to me while I was working at Pomellato and Cartier. What I noticed — the gap we saw in the market — was that we couldn’t offer a luxury home service to the clients of the great maisons.
Nicolò Daniele Donato, Founder & Managing Director, Deluxy
That gap cut both ways, he says: it limited the experience of the client receiving the gift, and it limited the sender, who had no way of sending something beautiful and personalised to someone’s home in a way that would astonish them. Deluxy launched in 2019, in Milan and Rome. It was, in Donato’s account, the first white-glove delivery service on the market. The idea was born gradually and developed naturally, in stages. Since then the company has selected and trained more than fifty valets and works with over a hundred local artists chosen, he says, for the quality of the bespoke surprises they make.
An emotion has to be created
Everything is managed online — the order, the personalisation, the communication. The gift itself is made by selected local artists in the cities where Deluxy operates, and the selection is deliberately narrow, done case by case to guarantee the quality of the product and of the final experience. The company runs a dedicated service seven days a week, staffed by people who answer any request a client has and allow full personalisation of a gift, a surprise or any service asked of them. The sender can stay anonymous. Deliveries run every day of the week, and Deluxy takes on tailor-made jobs: at midnight, at specific hours, or in surprising places — on Lake Como, in exclusive private areas that are normally not accessible.
Our idea is that an emotion has to be created, and you create it by taking care of the whole experience, three hundred and sixty degrees: from the selection of the product, to how the card is written, to how the delivery is made.
Nicolò Daniele Donato, Founder & Managing Director, Deluxy
Deluxy has competitors, Donato says, and what differentiates it — what he always likes to recall — is that the company has a purpose: to let people and companies amaze. The requests arrive in every register. Three hundred red roses. A message flown from Milan to Sardinia on a dedicated flight for one client. Even, in his phrase, aligning the stars so that relationships could begin.
The aperitivo in the kitchen
Eleonora Mannini joined Deluxy around a year ago as commercial director, after many years in luxury and fashion in commercial and sales roles. She describes the company as positive, energetic, dynamic and very young — a forge of ideas, where the exchange between people is valuable. Her work runs from prospecting clients in the luxury and fashion world she came from, to negotiating contracts and agreements with partners and suppliers, including a pastry world she had known mainly as a customer.
Asked which of Deluxy’s experiences stayed with her, she picks an aperitivo at a couple’s home. The husband asked whether a delivery could be made in grand style, with flowers and a gift. Everything was organised down to the smallest detail, and the delivery had to arrive at a precise hour. The valet did not just deliver: he set up and served the aperitivo for the couple.
The next day the client called me and he was delighted. We had created an unforgettable moment in the simplest of places — the kitchen of their own home.
Eleonora Mannini, Commercial Director, Deluxy
For corporate clients, Mannini describes the offer in the same register at a different scale: bespoke services at a very high quality standard that represent the image of a company — corporate gifting and delivery, PR, marketing and clienteling strategies built together with the client, corporate events, catering, staging.
Where luxury moved
Mannini reads the market as one with enormous potential. Reports, she says, point to a surge over the next five years, up to 2030, in hospitality and services rather than in luxury goods — clothing, accessories, watches, jewellery. Luxury, in her account, has shifted from the consumption of a product to experiential luxury.
Filling the part of the segment that had no Luxury Premium delivery service was, she says, Donato’s great intuition. When Deluxy was born, the competitors were Glovo, Deliveroo and Just Eat: far more commercial logistics companies. The maisons of luxury and fashion were investing enormously in customer experience inside their stores, and at the moment of delivery that same customer experience was not there.
What we did was extend the brand experience all the way to the homes of the luxury maisons’ clients.
Eleonora Mannini, Commercial Director, Deluxy
The first challenge, Donato says, was making the market understand what Deluxy was. As it grew, the challenge became organising the company to reach its ambitions and become an international business. Today it counts fifty thousand clients around the world and more than a hundred companies that have chosen it for very specific services.
The cash flow behind the surprises
The model has a financial consequence Donato describes plainly. Deluxy offers corporate clients sixty-day payment terms, so it can be a single reference partner for a whole range of services. At the same time it collects orders from private clients for gifts, cakes and surprises produced by local artists. Between those two flows sit the people who have to be paid: valets, employees, local artists.
That, he says, creates a complexity in managing the finances: cash flow management against the timing of corporate and end-client payments.
Deluxy found Vivid online, through an advertisement. Donato was looking for a financial partner that would allow flexible management of the company’s finances and, at the same time, pay a return on the liquidity the business has in excess in certain periods. Deluxy uses the Business Account, the Interest Account for that return, and Cashback — and it is through the cashback and the interest, he says, that the company saves.
We’ve been using Vivid for about a year and so far the feedback is very positive. I find Vivid very useful, above all for being able to interact quickly through the app.
Nicolò Daniele Donato, Founder & Managing Director, Deluxy
The plan for the coming years is to become international: consolidating the presence in America, opening new markets, and supporting the development of the Italian market. Turin is already opening in September; the next opening will be Paris, in a French market Mannini calls extremely promising. Then Europe, and the rest of the world.
Donato’s advice to anyone who wants to start in a sector that does not exist — to create it — is the same thing he did. Start, and make the big plans and the adjustments after you have started. Begin experimenting, look for the solution, and then stop to understand how to make things work. The objective, he says, is not to stop in front of difficulties, but to understand how to face them and turn them into an opportunity.
Note: This article reflects the individual experience of a Vivid customer and is provided for general information only. It is not legal, financial, investment or tax advice, and is not a guarantee of future results. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of capital, and the value of investments can go down as well as up. Product availability, rates and conditions depend on your plan and may change. Information is current as of August 2026. Please seek advice from a qualified professional before making financial decisions.
