The gift is the easy part
Picking what to give is maybe an hour of work. Everything after that is the actual project: sizes, addresses, a Slack thread that never dies, an Excel sheet three people are editing at once, a supplier quote that takes a week to come back, and twelve people who still haven't filled in the form by December 10th.
Most guides to employee Christmas gifts skip straight to a list of products. This one spends more time on the part that actually breaks: timing, logistics, and getting it to people who aren't sitting in an office you control. For the product list itself, see 25 corporate gift ideas and 27 corporate holiday gift ideas, both with real pricing and minimum order quantities.
Why employee Christmas gifting is worth doing properly
A branded item only does anything for you if someone uses it. In a 258-person study Sunday ran with Sapience and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel on the branded merchandise programme at Belgian rail operator NMBS/SNCB, the gap between items was enormous: bags were worn more than twice by 69% of recipients, sweaters by 67%. Plain socks were never worn at all by 31% of the people who received them, the worst score in the study. That's not a small difference. It's the entire gift, working or not.
The same logic holds inside a company. A hoodie someone wears on a Friday call does more for how connected they feel to the team than a mug that sits in a cupboard. Christmas is the one moment a year almost every employee expects some kind of acknowledgment, which makes it a bad place to hand out something forgettable.
The NMBS/SNCB Christmas collection used in Sunday's 258-person research study on branded merchandise and employee engagement.
When to start
Work backward from December 25th, not forward from whenever the idea comes up. Lead times vary a lot depending on what you're sending and whether it's a stock item or something custom-branded. As a rough guide from products actually run through Sunday's catalog: a stock item like a branded backpack can ship in around 17 work days, a custom charging station or luggage tag set closer to 33 to 45.
Count backward from there, then add time for the part that has nothing to do with production: getting sizes and addresses out of a distributed team. That's usually the slower half of the timeline, not the manufacturing.
| Team size | Realistic start date | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Under 50, one office | Late October | Simple size and address collection, standard stock items |
| 50 to 300, multiple offices | Mid September | Longer collection window, split shipments by location |
| 300+, remote or multi-country | Early September | Customs, multiple carriers, longer response windows across time zones |
How much to spend
There's no universal number, but three tiers cover most companies:
- Under €50 per person. Enough for a well-made single item: a beanie, a good pair of socks, a water bottle. Suits large teams or a supplement to a bigger year-end bonus.
- €50 to €150 per person. A hoodie or jacket, a backpack, or a small bundle. This is where most standard employee Christmas gifting sits.
- €150 and up. Reserved for leadership, long-tenure staff, or a smaller, more senior team. Think a premium jacket, a travel set, or a curated box with two or three items.
For reference, real per-unit pricing on items commonly used for this: a RollTop waterproof backpack from around €26, a weekender travel bag from around €53, a 3-in-1 charging station from around €49, a leather luggage tag set from around €15, a travel pillow from around €19. Custom branding and lower volumes push these up; larger orders bring them down. See the full 2026 gift list for pricing across dozens more items.
What people actually use
Across Sunday's order data, the items that get reordered most for employee gifting are unglamorous on paper: sports socks, T-shirts, hoodies, sports jerseys, tote bags, backpacks, power banks, and leather luggage tags. None of that is a coincidence. It matches the usage research above almost exactly: apparel and bags get worn and carried, desk objects get left on a desk. For the ranked, data-backed version of this list, see 25 best company swag ideas employees will actually use, which pairs each item with its measured wear rate from the same NMBS/SNCB study.
A few principles worth applying before you pick anything:
- Choose things people would buy for themselves. A gift that only exists because it has a logo on it reads as marketing, not thanks.
- Let branding be visible, not shy about it. A small, well-placed logo on a good product performs better than a huge one on a cheap one.
- Skip anything sized wrong by default. Apparel without a size choice built in has a built-in failure rate. Collect sizes, or let people pick.
- Think about where it's opened. A gift that arrives at an empty office over the holidays is a gift nobody sees until January, if then.
Gifting across offices, countries, and remote teams
This is where most Christmas gifting projects actually go wrong, and it has nothing to do with the gift itself.
Delaware ran into exactly this: four European countries, office deliveries in some locations, roughly 300 remote employees in others, everyone needing a say in what they got, and two weeks to put the whole thing together. The team designed a small set of products in Delaware's own branding, put eight options to a team vote, landed on three winners plus a charity donation option for anyone who'd rather give the value away, then collected every address and preference automatically and shipped by department.
"It went from a horrible experience to something the team actually enjoyed," said Silke at Delaware.
The pattern generalizes. The three things that make multi-country gifting hard are the same every time: collecting current addresses from people who've moved since the last company database update, giving remote staff the same say in what they get as people in an office, and getting packages through customs without someone manually tracking a hundred shipments by hand. Solve those three and the actual gift selection is the easy part again. See sending Christmas gifts to remote employees for the full breakdown of what has to be true for this to work.
Let people choose
Centrally picking one item for an entire company is the single biggest predictable failure mode in employee gifting. Sizing goes wrong, taste goes wrong, and anyone who receives something they won't use gets nothing out of the gesture regardless of what it cost.
A short list of options, voted on or picked individually, fixes most of that at once. It also means the person choosing addresses and sizes is the person who actually knows them: the employee, not someone in HR guessing.
The moment that actually matters: opening a gift that was picked, not assigned.
Common questions
How much does employee Christmas gifting cost?
It depends entirely on the products chosen and the volume ordered, the same as any bulk purchase. Get pricing against your actual list rather than budgeting off a rule of thumb.
Is there a minimum order?
Sunday's standard minimum is 10 pieces per item, which covers everything from a small team to a full company rollout.
We have people across a dozen countries. Can this actually ship there?
Sunday ships globally and produces out of the EU, Turkey, and Asia, so routing and customs handling adapts to where recipients actually are rather than shipping everything from one warehouse.
What if we're already behind on the deadline?
Stock items with shorter lead times are the fastest path if custom production won't make it in time. Talk to Sunday's team about what's realistic for your date before ruling anything out.
Do we need design or IT resources to set this up?
No. Product visualization in your brand and address or size collection are handled on the platform without a design file or an internal build.
What happens after the gifts are delivered?
That's when the useful data starts: delivery confirmation, feedback, and engagement tracking on the campaign, rather than the project ending the moment boxes ship.
Further reading
Sending Christmas gifts to remote employees for distributed and multi-country teams · 27 corporate holiday gift ideas and 25 corporate gift ideas for the full product list · 25 best company swag ideas, ranked by measured wear rate · the full NMBS/SNCB research study · Client gift ideas for the external side of holiday gifting · Employee gifts, explained
