Client Gifting Programmes

The Brief

An iconic London event venue approached us for a standalone client gifting project for a key seasonal event. The brief was for premium, memorable British treats, branded to the venue and finished with a handwritten card in every hamper, provided by each recipient’s own contact at the venue. Because every gift serves as a marketing tool, each box had to be designed strictly around the venue’s brand and their campaign theme.

A Growing Relationship

The client brings the occasion and a steer, and we bring their ideas to life with real product, branding and packaging suggestions. We also provide the sourcing, the fulfilment, the delivery and any customs paperwork when required. Their brand brief is modern premium with a touch of quirkiness, and every project has landed squarely inside it.

The Ideas: The gifts are always intended by the client for teams to gather round and enjoy together. This Easter we proposed an Easter themed smash cake. No bunny mould came close, but we found a beautiful daisy, large enough to hold a generous amount of chocolate for the team to share. The client loved the idea and tied it to a set of Flower Show tickets they had. From there the concept developed from a standard chocolate filling, to sugar flowers, to custom moulded flowers made from white chocolate and coloured to look like a bouquet bursting out of the cake as it’s smashed, for the ultimate Instagrammable Easter gift. We also include a branded wooden mallet. After the first Easter gift we realised an ordinary chocolate hammer couldn’t handle our thick Belgian chocolate, and with no plans to reduce that luxury thickness, we moved to specialist crab hammers, branded in house and perfect for breaking through the shell.

Sourcing with Character: Modern premium with a touch of quirkiness is such an enjoyable brief, especially with the steer towards recognisably British brands and, where possible, from London. Apart from Easter, every project is a hamper, so each one carries a selection of items chosen to complement each other within the project theme. One Thanksgiving hamper included a Harrods London bus tin filled with chocolates, sent to recipients in the USA. Another carried Hotel Chocolat’s chocolate recreation of the Thanksgiving classic, pumpkin pie. One Christmas we included chocolate lumps of coal. Another year we worked with Harvey Nichols to secure over 120 panettones, alongside treats from other luxury London department stores paired with goods from unique artisan producers.

Navigating Customs: New US tariffs had come into effect just as we were planning a Thanksgiving dispatch, so we researched the rules, explained the financial risks in simple terms and came up with a plan to minimise customs charges when making the hamper product selection. We ship DDP (Delivered Duty Paid) as standard, so recipients are never responsible for paying tax on a gift sent to them by our clients.

Issue Resolution - The One That Nearly Went Wrong

Designing a premium gift is the easy part. The real test is protecting the timeline when the production run moves against you.

The Challenge: Mid-production, the client’s timeline moved forward by a full week. Then the cakes arrived and failed our quality standard. The chocolatier had no space left on their production schedule to remake the batch inside the new timeframe, so they couldn’t complete the project. That left us with no product, a shortened deadline and a complex luxury item still to deliver.

The Recovery: We don’t hide bad news, and we never bring a client a problem without a plan. Within hours of discovering the original smash cakes were sub-standard, we notified the client, explained the situation and presented a fast track recovery plan. We brought in a professional chef, secured replacement moulds, sourced premium Belgian white chocolate and had the smash cakes remade within 48 hours.

The Outcome

The cakes were dispatched one working day later than the accelerated dispatch date, requiring just one rescheduled meeting. Delivering a project when everything goes right is simple. Keeping the standard high when a supply chain fails is why this gifting programme continues to run season after season.