Customized Gifts for Your Business Clients

With Chinese new year right around the corner, this also means one thing in Singapore: It’s corporate gifts season!

Corporate gift is not a new thing; in fact, it is so common that everyone and their mailman has either given or been given corporate gifts, and that is both a blessing and a curse. The delightful part is, giving always brings in a good feeling, that is, if you know for sure that you do a good job giving the gift. On the other hand, exactly because corporate gift is so common, a lot of them are considered very boring, some gifts, and this might seem cruel, have never even been opened! And that, would be the cursing. Nobody wants to give out a gift that never gets opened. Not even for corporate gifts, and especially not corporate gifts!

So the question is, how do you avoid being boring with your corporate gifts for the business clients? And keep in mind that the chance is that your business clients receive, or at least have seen a lot of corporate gifts.

There are more than a couple answers and approach to this question, but making them customized gifts is always a good approach and first step to that. By doing this, you let them know that they are special to you, and that you have them in mind when you are doing your holiday or seasonal greetings planning.

 

How do you customize gifts for your business clients?

 

When it comes to customized gifts for business clients, almost everyone’s first instinct is to incorporate their logo to your gifts. While this is a very sweet thought, it almost always creates some copy right issues. Remember, logos are generally protected by trademark and are intellectual property. Unauthorized use of someone else’s logo should be avoided. Even if and when you mean well. Another thing is that it might trigger some compliance issue, especially if your client is a big or even multi-national company. Should any of the gifts end up at the hand of a third party, the logo on it would be generally interpreted as the source of the item, which would be associated with responsibility. Should things go south, it could go wrong real fast, and bad.

Related (Corporate Gift Ideas for the Holidays)

That is not to say you shouldn’t put any logo on your gifts at all. In fact, you should definitely put your own logo, not only will that remind them where the gift came from somewhere down the road, it will also prevent the “out of sight, out of mind” situation when your interaction with each other is less frequent.

 

No their logo, just my logo, what else can I do to make my gift for my business client more “customized”?

 

Generally, a gift that comes with your own business logo is already considered “customized”, but, it never hurts to take it to the next level. For example, things like calendars have a lot of space of customization. If you are producing a large number of corporate gifts for one business clients and have a long history of working together with the client, considering creating designs or images that tells the story of your working history or a showcase of the products or projects that you’ve worked together on. Yes, calendars are very common and could often be boring, but this touch of customization will certainly make your calendar stands out while sending the message of “We care about you and we value your business and our working relationship!”.

If you don’t have a long list of products or projects that you’ve worked on together, don’t get frustrated just yet. If your client’s office is in an iconic building, a nice, little model of the building as an accessory is always a cute way to say thank you and this is a special gift for you.

After all, the art of gift giving, regardless corporate gifts or personal gifts, is revolve around bringing joy to the recipient. Making them feel special is a great way to do it. Whatever you’re choosing to give to your client as a highly customized, corporate gift, don’t be afraid to make it personal. It could be an item that means something to them, it could be something that triggers the memory of working together, or even something that would make anyone think of them.

To sums it up, the general directions you want to go for a very customized corporate gift for your client are:

1. Make it all about them (But do not use their logo)
2. Make it all about your long history of working together

And remember, don’t limit yourself with designs, graphics or prints to demonstrate the above, a clever little item that does either of that would work just fine!