The short version
delaware, a Belgian ICT and business consultancy with 5,000+ employees across 20 countries, ran an end-of-year gift for its people. One private webshop behind its own single sign-on, seven gift options, one coin per person, individual home delivery. The campaign opened on a single page with one call to action, and everything behind it ran on Sunday. It closed at 1,488 orders against 1,488 coins redeemed, with zero employee records ever exported.
Who delaware is
delaware is a global ICT and business consulting firm, founded in 2003 out of a management buy-out from Andersen and Deloitte, headquartered in Belgium. More than 5,000 people work across 20 countries and 38 offices, delivering SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce and OpenText transformations. Two details drive everything that follows: most of delaware's people are consultants working at client sites, not sitting where a pallet of boxes can be handed out; and delaware advises clients on information security and data governance for a living, which sets a high bar for what a third-party gifting platform is allowed to hold.
Why employee Christmas gifting breaks past 1,000 people
At 50 people, a Christmas gift is a nice afternoon. At 5,000, it is an operations project that nobody has staffed. The default approach looks cheap on the quote and expensive everywhere else: one gift is chosen for everyone, so roughly a third of the company receives something they will never use; someone guesses the size curve and produces leftover stock; HR builds a spreadsheet of names, sizes and home addresses, then chases the people who never replied; that spreadsheet gets emailed to a supplier, where it becomes a personnel database with no owner and no expiry date; and boxes arrive in bulk at a few offices for someone to redistribute by hand.
None of that appears on the invoice. All of it is real cost. The cheap version of employee gifting is usually the expensive one.
