A shop that opens on a schedule, not a campaign built in November
Sunday runs a branded merchandise programme for PGS Group, a wooden packaging manufacturer with 900+ employees, 40+ sites and operations in nine countries. Every employee gets an annual coin balance, earns more through challenges, and spends it when the shop opens roughly four times a year. December is one of those windows. Most companies build a Christmas gift campaign in November; PGS does not have one. It has a shop that opens on a schedule, a coin balance every employee already holds, and a December window that needs almost nothing built for it.
Who PGS Group is
PGS Group operates in the wooden packaging industry, with more than 30 years as a logistics partner. The group employs 900+ people across more than 40 sites in nine countries: France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Ukraine, Latvia, Morocco and the United States. That footprint sets the problem. A workforce spread over 40 industrial sites is not one you reach with a December email and a pallet of identical boxes at head office. Earlier merchandise initiatives at PGS reached HQ employees only — the people running production in Morocco, Latvia or Ukraine were structurally excluded from anything organised centrally.
Why the December scramble is the wrong shape
The standard corporate Christmas gift is a project with a hard deadline and no reusable parts. Someone picks an item in September and commits to a quantity before knowing demand; sizes get guessed; a budget gets approved late, so production runs hot; boxes ship to a few central locations and someone redistributes them; and in January the leftovers go into a storeroom, to be rebuilt from scratch eleven months later. The cost is not the merchandise — it is that nothing compounds. PGS inverted it: the infrastructure is permanent, and the campaign is just a date on which it opens.
The four mechanics worth copying
1. A standing balance, not a December budget. Every employee holds a coin balance, and PGS sets the annual allocation in advance, so the company knows its total merchandise spend for the year before a single item is ordered. Because the balance persists between openings, employees make a real choice: spend now, or save for the next window when new items land.
