Diwali corporate gifting: what to print and when

Timing

Personalised items — mugs, diaries, desk sets — need artwork approved six to eight weeks ahead in normal conditions, and longer in season. Ordering in September means choice; ordering three weeks before means whatever is left.

What actually gets used

Gifts that survive January are the ones worth printing. Diaries and drinkware stay on desks all year and carry your name with them. Novelty items are opened, appreciated and forgotten within a week.

What to order, by budget

Corporate gifting divides fairly cleanly by what you are prepared to spend per recipient, and the useful thing is to be honest about which band you are in rather than stretching one gift too thin across too many people.

• Modest — a printed mug or a desk diary. Used daily, seen constantly.
• Middle — a hamper with printed packaging and a personalised card.
• Generous — a curated set in a custom-printed rigid box.

The card matters more than the gift

A gift with no note is a delivery. The card is what makes it from a person rather than from a procurement department, and it is the cheapest part of the whole exercise.

Print it early and separately from the gift itself. Cards turn round in two to three days; personalised merchandise does not, and tying the two together means the slower one sets the date.

The specifications this applies to

For reference, here is how it works out on the products this comes up on most often.

• Ceramic Mugs — 200 × 85 mm finished, 2 mm bleed, 300 DPI minimum, from ₹200 per unit with a minimum of 1.

Ordering

Every file is checked automatically before printing, so a mistake in any of this is caught while it can still be corrected rather than after a run is on paper.

Standard delivery is free to every PIN code in India — two working days to a metro, up to twelve to the islands — and prices include GST, so the figure on the product page is the figure charged. Add a GSTIN at checkout and the invoice carries it for input credit.

Working backwards from the date

Anything tied to a date should be ordered from the date backwards, not from today forwards. Take the event, subtract transit for the destination, subtract production, then subtract a few days for the round of artwork correction that almost always happens.

That last allowance is the one people leave out, and it is the one that turns a comfortable schedule into a rushed one.