The Client Gift That's Still on the Door in January
Most client gifts have a half-life of about a day.
The chocolate gets eaten on the drive home. The fancy kind, in the parking lot. The branded tumbler goes into the cabinet with the other branded tumblers. The wine is nice, if they drink. Either way, it's gone by Friday. None of these are bad gifts. They're just short ones.
If you've been handed the client list this year, here's what we've learned from shipping wreaths to a few hundred front doors. The gifts people remember are the ones they keep running into.
Send it home, not to the office. The office is where gifts go to be shared. Anything left at reception belongs to the team by 10 a.m. A gift at home is a gift to a person.
Pick something they'll see every day. A wreath hangs on the front door. Your client passes it on the way out in the morning and on the way home at night. So does their spouse. So do the neighbors. Six weeks on a cold door, sometimes eight. That's about eighty small reminders of who sent it, and none of them carry your logo.
Keep your logo off the gift. Put the firm on the card, not on the object. A branded gift is an ad your client has to decide whether to display. The card does the attribution. The wreath does the remembering.
Write the message before you pick the gift. If you can't write two honest sentences to a client, no gift will fix that. If you can, almost any good gift will carry them. Writing the notes first also tells you who belongs on the A list.
Choose a week, not a day. Fresh things don't run on warehouse clocks. Pick a delivery week with room on both sides. A gift that arrives the week of December 1 feels generous. The same gift on December 23 feels like a scramble.
Start earlier than feels necessary. Anything made to order has a ceiling. Ours is one family workshop in western Washington and one season. In August we can build almost any order into the plan. In mid-November we may have to say no. Most buyers learn this in their second year.
A buyer who has done this for years put it better than we can:
"After YEARS of late deliveries, inconsistent quality and tedious communication I have found a company that truly delivers. I'm very happy to have found Wreath.Co as a partner in our favorite opener to the holiday season."
Thomas J., verified buyer
How we do it. We make one wreath. It's called Doory. It's 26 inches of Noble Fir, salal, red huckleberry, juniper berries and white pine, built the week it ships from boughs cut days earlier. It carries about 8 pounds of greens, twice what most store-bought wreaths do.
Doory is $98. About what a good bottle of wine costs, and nobody regifts this one.
You send the list. Each Doory ships in its own kraft box to its own address. Your message is printed in real ink on real paper and mailed ahead of the wreath. In most cases the card gets there first. The message is also printed on the packing slip, so your words arrive either way.
What happens next. Tell us roughly how many and which week you'd like them to land. We get on a fifteen-minute call. If it's a fit, a sample Doory arrives at your office in October, in the real box, with a real card. Then you decide.
Not ready for a list? Tell me what you're planning, even roughly, and grab fifteen minutes with me. If you're weighing a natural gift for your clients this year, I'm happy to talk it through, even if the answer isn't a wreath.
Next in Field Notes: Six things to check on any wreath, including ours →
Jonah, founder, wreath.co