DBA offers Downtown Culver City gift cards for holiday shoppers

Still searching for a holiday gift? Keep your spending local with a new Culver City gift card opportunity.

The Culver City Downtown Business Association now offers a mobile Downtown Culver City gift card, usable like a prepaid MasterCard at 17 local businesses, including Jameson’s Pub, The Culver Theater, Village Well Books and Coffee, and Color Me Mine.

The Downtown Business Association has looked for a way to bring a feature like this to the Culver City community for years, but Executive Director Darrel Menthe began a more concerted effort to launch a community gift card program in October 2024.

"It came from 10 years of people asking me, 'Is there any way I can give something that works in more than one place in Downtown Culver City?'," Menthe told Culver Crescent of the idea for a community gift card.

Managing the money in-house was a logistical project the DBA could not undertake. That all changed when Menthe found out about Yiftee, a company specializing in community gift cards that serves over 700 communities and 19,000 merchants from Del Mar, CA, to Princeton, NJ.

“What’s exciting about this,” Menthe said, “is that we finally have a product you can buy as a present that works throughout Downtown Culver City.”

Yiftee handles the logistics of community gift cards. Although established in 2012, Menthe waited for a specific feature to become available before launching.

“As of June 1, Yiftee was ready for Apple Wallet,” Menthe explained. “That's what I needed.”

With Apple Wallet cards in play, Menthe was ready to get the program started, and the DBA officially made the new community gift cards available for purchase in late August. These cards are mobile-only and can be for $25, $50, $100, $200, or $250. They can be used at 17 locations throughout the Downtown Area, with more likely to come as businesses continue to work through the process.

“It’s a bit of a process to sign up,” Menthe explained. “We have to customize it for each business.”

Yiftee makes money through fees attached to these cards, but Menthe factored this in when starting the program. Instead of passing on the fee to customers, the DBA has put forward $1,500 to cover these fees for the first $75,000 of cards purchased. Security is one of the foremost concerns for businesses, and this is one of the reasons Menthe wanted to outsource the program's back-end to a reputable company like Yiftee.

The incentive for the Downtown Business Association is clear. While businesses may prefer their own cards, Menthe believes it is a beneficial compromise for those who do not want to restrict their gift-giving to a single location or product. For Menthe and the DBA, it is a way to encourage spending in Downtown Culver City and help support its businesses.

“It keeps dollars local, but you're also giving somebody options and not tying them to a particular restaurant or a particular location,” Menthe said.

If this program is a success and interest lingers beyond the initial $75,000, Menthe hopes to keep it going and potentially expand on the offering. A program in West Hollywood, “WeHo Loves Locals,” is also available and themed for the holiday season, but with an additional perk.

Those who buy the WeHo Loves Locals gift card, usable at more than 60 different West Hollywood businesses, during the 2025 holidays are awarded an additional 50% as a bonus. According to Menthe, a similar promotion done in West Hollywood sold out of $100,000 worth of cards in just three weeks.

He hopes to implement a similar idea in Culver City, but that would require financial support from the city itself. Given the city's current financial state, even with revenue from Measure CL beginning in a few weeks, Menthe feels those conversations are still in the distance.

Even so, he remains optimistic about the program's impact. Implementing it before the holidays helped establish a foundation for gift season.

“If you have employees you want to give something to, if you have a friend, if you just want to find a unique gift for, this is it,” Menthe said. “It's Culver City-centric, and it resides in your phone.”

For more information and to purchase a card for a friend or family member, click here.