Building your core collection

Great gifting starts with a strong core buy, a carefully selected group of gifts that cover the majority of your use cases. It’s an investment that unlocks more design possibilities, greater savings and even better brands — and the returns are real.

You’ll maximize your gift budget, getting more (and better) gifts for less, and your audience will receive gifts they don’t just want to hold on to, but actively shout about.

Wondering how? We’ve got you covered.

Knowing what you want is the best way to achieve it, so get strategic: know your audience, define your goals, and plan your collection accordingly.

Your audience is a community, and understanding what makes them tick is the first step to creating gifts that really resonate, and feeling confident in that first core buy.

Next, work out what success looks like for you. Is it generating online conversation? Differentiating yourself from competitors? Making sure your event is unforgettable? Whatever your gifting goals, we’re here to help.

Once you know what you want, bigger buys mean lower unit prices. Investing in fewer SKUs at higher quantities will give you more for less, while helping maintain brand consistency and covering multiple use cases.

We crunched the numbers for one of our customers who made multiple merch buys across the year and found they could have saved over 40% by switching to a single core buy (which also would have brought better, more sustainable gift options into their budget — more on that later).

Designing a whole collection at once means perfect visibility over how your brand shows up. Brand colors in perfect harmony, slogans that say it all, a logo you’ll be proud to wear.

And not only will you be fully brand-aligned, but larger numbers unlock even more merch magic. Custom labels, Pantone-matched bases, details that will really resonate with your audience: all of these become more accessible at higher volumes.

Taking this approach will save time overall at the artwork and approval stages.

With core collections, we generally see fewer feedback rounds needed, so you can cut weeks off your approval time and get gifts into production.

Core collections also make replenishing your Inventory easy, as we’ll have all the approved artwork on file and ready to go.

As we mentioned, leveraging economies of scale means that you can afford to go premium with brands that amplify your values.

We’ll always help you find the gifts that are right for you, because your core collection should reflect your core values. Better gifts mean a better chance of everyday use, and there’s no bigger brand endorsement than that!

As a B Corp, we work with some amazing brands like Everybody.World, Ocean Bottle and Terra Thread who are experts in creating responsible products that bring positive change to the world of gifting and merchandise.

All of this helps free up time and money to push your gifting even further. Supplement your core with smaller buys, campaign-specific gifts that feel relevant to the occasion (for us, that normally means spinning tops, our favorite books and things made from brass!).

By creating a strong core, you’ll always have a solid foundation to build on, and you’ll have the budget and headspace to create something really special.