Christmas gifts for clients and employees

Sound familiar? In December, a box sits somewhere in the office: pens, notebooks and mugs, all with a logo, all identical. You take one because it is there. And by February nobody remembers who it came from.

Christmas gifts for clients and employees are actually a lovely thing. They say: this year with you was good, thank you. But exactly that message gets lost when the gift looks as if it was bought for everyone and no one at the same time. Small businesses, teams and freelancers in particular have an advantage here that they often don't use: they still know their people by name.

Personal instead of giveaways

A giveaway is practical because you can order it in bulk without having to think. But you can tell. A gift with your own name on it reads differently. It says: someone thought of you here, not of a list.

It doesn't have to be expensive. I even think it is usually better small. A big hamper sometimes puts the recipient in an awkward position, especially with clients. Something small with a name, on the other hand, can simply be accepted and kept without feeling like an obligation.

When I choose a gift, I ask myself: would this still be lying somewhere visible in six months? A board in the kitchen, a card on the pinboard, a little tile at the edge of the screen: then it was worth it.

Christmas gifts for employees: personalized and small

For Christmas gifts for colleagues and employees, the same applies to me. Rather a small thing with a name than something big and interchangeable.

A card that fits well here is the Occasion card “Danke” (Thank you). The card reads »Das war nicht selbstverständlich« (that wasn't something to take for granted), and below »Es hat mir viel bedeutet.« (It meant a lot to me.) With engraving, the name appears along the curve at the bottom of the wooden tile, for €9.90. For someone who carried the team through a difficult project, that sentence often fits better than any "Merry Christmas".

If you would rather give something to use, the Breakfast board “Flower meadow” is a piece for no particular occasion: beech wood, approx. 22.5 × 12 cm, with the name engraved above daisies, poppies and clover. It costs €12.90 and has nothing to do with Christmas, which I see as an advantage. It won't be put away again in January.

And whatever it ends up being: one handwritten line makes more of it than any wrapping. One sentence is enough, as long as it is true only for this one person. "Thank you for stepping in this spring" is worth more than three lines about a successful business year.

Plan quantities and order early

Personalized pieces need a little time, because each one is engraved individually. Within Germany I count on 7 to 10 working days until delivery, production included, and 9 to 12 to Austria. Allow at least two weeks before Christmas Eve, more if there are several names. If you order for a whole team, a list helps: names in the right spelling, ideally checked by a second person. A swapped letter goes unnoticed while engraving, but not when unwrapping.

For larger quantities or your own ideas, write to me beforehand via the contact form. Then we can look together at what is possible in what time, instead of you ending up waiting for a delivery that no longer arrives in time.

One point I want to be honest about, because it matters for businesses: I work as a small business under § 19 of the German VAT Act (Kleinunternehmerregelung). My prices are final prices, and no VAT is shown on the invoice. For you as a company, that means there is no input VAT you can reclaim. Good to know before you do your budget.

Your own merch with a cutting file

Some small businesses prefer to make their gifts themselves, with a cutting plotter in the office or the workshop: printed gift bags, cushions, cards. For that there are my cutting files, for example the Cutting file “Fir Tree with Star” as a ZIP with SVG, DXF, PNG and instructions.

The license is what matters here. The private-use license only covers your own non-commercial use, and gifts from a company to its clients are commercial. For anything you do with it as a business, take the commercial license for €24.90. What exactly it allows is on the license page, and if you are unsure, rather ask me beforehand.

Thinking of clients beyond December

I think the Christmas gift is rarely what clients remember. They remember the card in June when the project was done, or the short message on the company anniversary. In December everything arrives at once, and even the nicest client Christmas gift gets lost among twenty others.

My husband Philipp Krapp is a software developer, and in his work he deals with exactly this question: how businesses stay in touch with their clients throughout the year without becoming pushy. A lot of that happens on LinkedIn these days, and with his company he builds Compleadly, an AI LinkedIn automation with data hosted in the EU for exactly that. When we talk about it, we still often end up at the same point: whether digital or on paper, what counts is that the contact feels like a person and not like a list.

Maybe that is the real tip for this year: give something small with a name for Christmas. And put a note in your calendar for whom you will send a card to in spring, just because.