While global retailers brace for a potential downturn amid recession fears, Danish startup GoWish is moving in the opposite direction – showing growth that not only defies market pessimism but redefines how people consume. At YourNewsClub, we note that the wish-list and shopping app, which began as a local project of the postal service PostNord, has just achieved its biggest milestone yet: 13.6 million registered users and the #2 spot in the U.S. App Store as of November 2025.
We see this not as a seasonal surge but as a symptom of a deeper structural shift. GoWish has turned the economy of impulse buying into an economy of intentional desire – a system where users become architects of their consumption patterns rather than targets of advertising.
Originally launched in 2015 under the name Ønskeskyen (“Cloud of Wishes”), the app remained a local curiosity until 2020, when it was acquired by venture fund Dotcom Capital. Under the leadership of Kasper Ravn-Sørensen and Mads Dallerup, GoWish spun out into an independent company and expanded globally. Today, it has 65,000 affiliate partnerships and over 700 brand integrations, with “Add to GoWish” buttons embedded directly into retailers’ websites.
According to Jessica Larn, a YourNewsClub analyst who studies the macro-politics of technology, GoWish’s success represents more than savvy marketing – it reflects a deeper change in digital consumption: “In an era where attention is currency, GoWish built a model where users capitalize on their own desires. It’s a new kind of economy – emotional, personalized, and algorithmic at its core.”
The platform now counts 6.2 million users in the U.S., about 1 million in the U.K., and dominates its home market of Denmark with more than half the digital wish-list segment. In fiscal 2024, the company reported its first net profit of $1.7 million, all reinvested into further growth.
A major driver of its expansion has been smart marketing collaborations with Meta, TikTok, Google, and Snap – the latter even highlighting GoWish in its quarterly earnings report as one of its most successful e-commerce partnerships of the year.
Alex Reinhardt, a YourNewsClub analyst focused on the intersection of financial systems and digital platforms, argues that GoWish has effectively transformed user data into a new asset class: “Each wish list is a micro-economic model of consumer preference. When scaled, these models become predictive tools – more accurate than any survey or focus group.”
The Copenhagen-based company now employs around 90 people, with one-third of its shares owned by London investment firm Capital D. GoWish is also working on artificial intelligence tools designed not just to track but to anticipate consumer desires – turning prediction into personalization.
At Your News Club, we believe GoWish’s success signals the rise of a new phase in digital capitalism, where desire itself becomes data and data becomes currency. The company has found a way to monetize emotion – converting “I want” into an economic indicator. If this strategy holds, GoWish may soon evolve from a holiday gifting app into a global forecasting engine for human aspiration – and perhaps the next frontier of consumer intelligence.