Choose a corporate gifting company that can do four things for your list: put your logo on the gift itself, ship to Canadian recipients from inside Canada so nobody pays duty at the door, pack and send each gift to its own address, and confirm a holiday cutoff date in writing. When one of those is missing, that part of the job usually lands back on your team, often in the busiest weeks of December.
This guide walks through the three kinds of companies you'll find when you search, the questions worth asking each one, and the red flags that tend to show up before an order goes wrong. If you already know who you're gifting and need dates, our holiday gifting timeline covers the week-by-week plan.
"Corporate gifting company" covers businesses that work in very different ways. Knowing which kind you're talking to saves a lot of back-and-forth.
Each one fits a different kind of order. If you need 20 gift baskets by Friday with no logo, a gift box company may be the faster call. If you're sending 300 branded gifts to clients across Canada and the US, it helps to have one partner handling the whole order.
If your recipients are in Canada and the gifts ship from the US, each package can come with customs clearance and a duty charge at delivery, and it's usually your client who gets the bill. Ordering from a Canadian supplier keeps the order on one side of the border. We're based in Hamilton, Ontario, and work with businesses across North America, so a list that mixes Canadian and US addresses is a normal order for us.
Ask to see where the branding goes. A logo on a tumbler, a fleece or a notebook keeps your name in front of the client every time they use it. A sticker on the box usually ends up in the recycling with the box. Some programs want subtle branding on a premium item; others want it front and centre. Both are fine, as long as you choose it.
Client gifts rarely go to one place. Ask whether the supplier takes a spreadsheet of addresses, packs each gift on its own, labels it and ships it. Then ask who catches a bad address before the box goes out. For a list of a few hundred names, the answer can decide whether your team spends a week packing boxes.
Every supplier has a last day to order for delivery before the holidays, and it moves depending on the product, the decoration and the courier. Ask for that date in writing, for the specific products you're looking at. A specific date makes it much easier to plan everything else around it.
You should approve a mock-up or proof showing the logo, the colours and the placement before anything is printed or engraved. This is the step that catches a stretched logo or the wrong shade of blue. With us, mock-ups come before quantities are confirmed.
Holiday orders often have leftovers, and some companies prefer to send gifts on a schedule instead of all at once. Ask whether the supplier can hold the stock and ship it when you need it. We keep client inventory in our Hamilton and Buffalo warehouses and send it to an office, an event or a home address on request, through our promotional fulfillment service. A late addition to your list in December is a lot easier when the gift is already sitting on a shelf.
When account managers, sales reps and an assistant all feed names into one list, you want one person on the supplier side who knows the whole order. Ask who that is and how to reach them in December, not just at the quote stage.
One more that matters for budgets: ask about minimums. Some items can be ordered in small quantities for executive gifts, and larger runs usually bring the price per unit down. Our custom swag buying guide covers minimums and lead times in more detail.
Usually not, but the margin is thinner than most teams think. Six to eight weeks of lead time is a safe starting point for a holiday program, especially with custom packaging or a long list of individual addresses. Working back from a mid-December delivery, that puts the decision in late October or the first days of November.
If you're starting now, two things help. Pick products that are in stock with standard decoration, and save the custom box or the engraved item for next year. Then lock the address list this week, because that's the step that slows most programs down. Our holiday gifting timeline has the full week-by-week plan, and our guide to the best corporate gifts for employees covers gifts for your own team.
We start with a short call about who you're gifting, the occasion and your budget per person. From there:
We put together a selection of gifts for each group on your list, with packaging options and mock-ups for your approval.
Once the artwork is approved, we confirm quantities, the production time and the shipping plan, whether that's one office or a spreadsheet of addresses.
The order goes into production through the Proforma network.
We pack and ship, or keep the gifts in our Hamilton and Buffalo warehouses and send them on a schedule you set.
Businesses use this for client appreciation, referral-partner gifts, real estate closing gifts, staff milestones and year-end programs. One client put it this way in a Google review:
"Eric is very knowledgeable, and above all, has a keen ability to know what we'd like to offer - before we know what we want to offer."
See our page on corporate gifts in Canada for gift categories and budget ranges.
Get in touch with our team and tell us who's on your list, roughly how many people and your budget per gift. We'll come back with a selection, mock-ups and a date your order needs to be confirmed by.
