How we approached Christmas gifts for our clients last year
A practical look at why we sent individual winter gift packs to the people we worked with directly - and how SoMerch handled production, warehousing, and distribution.
Sending Christmas gifts as a company is one of those things that sounds straightforward until you start actually planning it. You have a list of clients, a rough budget, and a good intention. What follows is usually a combination of vendor emails, delivery logistics, and a nagging feeling that a single branded item shipped to a company address is not quite what you meant to do.
Last year we decided to approach it differently.
Gifts for people, not companies
The instinct with corporate gifting is to treat the client as a single entity. Send one package to the office, addressed to the company. It lands at reception, gets handed to whoever happens to be there, and that is roughly where the gesture ends.
We work closely with the individual people inside our client companies - the team members we are in weekly contact with, the ones who give feedback, make decisions, and move things forward. Sending one box to a company address did not feel proportional to those relationships.
So we flipped the approach. For each client, we sent individual gifts to every person on their team we had worked with directly throughout the year. A company we worked with closely across a team of five got five separate packages - each one going to the individual, wherever they happened to be.
What we sent
The logistics of sending to individuals across multiple companies
Here is where the good intention meets the operational reality. Sending individual gifts to team members across multiple client companies means you are not shipping to one or two addresses. You are shipping to many - different cities, different countries in some cases, all on a timeline that has to work before the holidays.
Managing that manually would mean sourcing the items, organising production, assembling each set, and coordinating individual shipments one by one. For a small software team, that is a project in itself - one that would have taken more time to run than the gifts were worth.
What we took away from it
The individual approach works. The feedback from clients was noticeably warmer than the standard "thank you for the gift" acknowledgement. Several people mentioned receiving it specifically, not just the company.
The operational side - which looked like the hard part at the start - turned out to be the easy part once the logistics were handled in one place. The harder part is the earlier decision: to treat a client gift as something sent to people, not to an address.
If you work closely with teams inside your client companies, it is worth thinking about. The difference in how it lands is significant. The difference in effort, with the right setup, is not.
For similar client gifting, team merch, and distributed shipment workflows, SoMerch can handle the product selection, production, storage, kitting, and multi-address distribution in one place.
