If  you are having trouble figuring out what business gift to buy your team, here are three questions to help guide you toward an answer.

1.  What’s your budget?  By figuring out your budget before you start shopping, you save time by focusing only on gifts you can afford.

2.  What purpose do you want your gift to serve?  Many business gifts fall into four categories:  fun, ornamental, monetary, and functional.  (Some gifts cross categories.)

• Fun gifts are office toys like stress balls, desktop games, and puzzles.
• Ornamental gifts are things like awards, plaques, and trophies.
• Monetary gifts include bonuses, cash prizes, and gift cards.
• Functional gifts are the largest category.  They include office accessories, personal accessories, apparel, electronics, and a host of other gifts that the recipient can put to use.

3.  How well do you know the recipients’ taste?  If you are giving to a small team and you know each person’s taste very well, then you can select gifts catered to their hobbies and personal interests.  If you don’t know their taste well, we recommend against gifts that require you to know something personal about the recipient.  For example:

• Apparel (you need to know their size and fit preference)
• Liquor (you need to know their personal habits)
• Food (unless you have knowledge of food allergies and religious restrictions)
• Gifts associated with specific religious holidays (unless you are sure they celebrate the holiday).

Here are some types of gifts we recommend if you don’t know the recipient very well.  These gifts are safe because they are things most people use.  They are also semi-permanent…which means they don’t last forever and it’s OK to own more than one of them.

• For functional personal gifts we recommend:
  • Umbrellas
  • Sports/recreational watches (people are more open to the style of a sports watch than a daily watch)
  • Duffel bags and cooler bags
• For functional office gifts we recommend:
  • Desk caddies and sticky note holders
  • Pens and laser pointers
  • USB flash drives
  • Leather or simulated leather jotter pads (small enough to fit in a glove box)
• For fun gifts we recommend:
  • Games that are familiar favorites for the culture.  In America these include checkers, tic tac toe, or dice games
  • Easy puzzles
  • Games with no correct answer like desktop sandboxes and magnetic sculptures
• For ornamental gifts we recommend the following guidelines:
  • Not too big (the award should not take up too much desktop or wall space)
  • Include display or mounting hardware
  • Select universally appealing colors.  In America these are blue, black, red, metallic gold, and metallic silver
  • Select a simple design with clean lines

We also recommend speaking with someone else who knows the team well before making your final selection.  A second opinion can help solidify your selection or provide you with additional gift ideas.  If you would like the opinion of gift giving professionals, we’re always here to help at info@promomento.com or 1-877-628-4646.

Did you know that spring is the best time to order your custom imprinted holiday cards?  This tip surprises many of our customers.  Greeting card companies offer deep discounts for orders placed during the spring…so they can keep their printing presses and staff busy during this ‘down time’.  And we pass the savings onto our customers.

You can save 50% or more on orders placed during May and June, plus get freebies like free return address printing on envelopes.  We can even delay the shipping and billing of your holiday card order until October.

This is a great deal for businesses with a predictable list of clients and partners who receive a card each year.  Small businesses can manage their budgets better by sending custom-imprinted holiday cards to their ‘top 100′ customers, and electronic holiday cards to all other customers.

Here are links to our two favorite card collections:

Traditional greeting cards printed on classic paper styles

Modern greeting cards digitally printed on smooth paper

We can also suggest lightweight, mailable promotional items to include inside your holiday cards.  Contact us for the latest ‘mailable’ inserts.

Gifts with American Flag images are a festive way to celebrate Memorial Day, the 4th of July, Labor Day, President’s Day…and other patriotic occasions.   Budgets are tight for many of our customers.   To keep your expenses down, we recommend our American Flag chocolate bars and our American Flag mints.  The chocolate bars come in a case of 50…and they are an easy way to spread the patriotic spirit among your team members and employees.  The American Flag mints are sold in a case of 1000…and they make a festive addition to your office candy bowl or reception area.  For more patriotic gift ideas, check out our Patriot Gift page.

American Flag chocolate bars

American Flag mints

Chocolate is always near the top of the list of gifts that people love to give and receive.  If you are planning to give chocolate as a gift within the next few months, we recommend ordering it now.  Then store it in a cool, dry place until you need it (but never refrigerate  it).

Once the weather reaches 70 degrees anywhere along the shipping route, we need to send the chocolate on ice via Fedex Air delivery.  Unfortunately that means a ‘warm weather surcharge’ applies to almost all chocolate orders shipped between May and September.    So if you are planning chocolate as a gift, order now!

Teamwork Chocolate Puzzle Piece - A Chocolate Gift Favorite!

When our customers have a full color image that they want to imprint on a desktop office accessory, this coaster is always on the short list of items we recommend.   Here’s why we like it:

• We can imprint it with a photo or a full color image.  It works well when customers have a Powerpoint image that they want to imprint on a gift.
• There’s no extra charge for a full color or photo imprint!
• It has a large imprint area…we can fill almost the entire surface of the coaster with the customer’s image.
• The glass is pretty thick and it comes with 4 anti-skid pads on the back.   The quality is nice for the price.
• The minimum order size is pretty small
• For special gift occasions, it has an optional windowed gift box that allows the imprinted image to show through the box.

Our customers have ordered this coaster for everything from sales meetings to end-of-project celebrations.  Typically they ask us to imprint it with their logo…but we can also imprint it with a picture of the team, a photo of a building for an office dedication, an image of a new product, or any kind of graphic text.  So many options – which is why this glass coaster  is clearly a winner!