Sweet Treats: Xmas Gifting

‘Tis the season of giving. I envy those that say they’re winding down for business in December! Every year we seem to have to get through the same workload regardless of the Christmas break, except in addition to the usual to-do’s, operations and client work we add some festive tasks to the list to celebrate the time of year. 

The Nice List

We’ve always sent out handwritten Christmas cards to clients, suppliers and key people that we have worked with throughout the year. It’s a relatively small gesture but it’s always well received. Creating the artwork, producing, writing and posting the cards certainly takes time and effort - and it seems that it is appreciated.

Bigger is Better?

In recent years we’ve upped our gifting game a little. We decided to send out wine to the people we do the most work with as a thank you for their business and support. Whatever you think of Christmas, we believe showing appreciation and giving something back to the individuals that drive the organisations we work with is great. It just so happens that Christmas gives us a good excuse to do so.

Staying On-Brand

We design our own Christmas cards to reflect our brand. It’s more personal and ultimately we’ll end up with our logo on a desk in Christmas card form as a reminder to that client and anyone else that ends up in their office. It’s a little trickier to brand up a bottle of (good) wine so this year we decided to test pilot a concept we’ll be using to attract new business and entice potential clients in 2020.

What could be more on-brand for We Are Sweet than Sweets? We considered some gourmet Christmas chocolates but this doesn’t scream “We Are Sweet”. We wanted to reflect the colourful gradients we use as a key component to our marketing, so a decision was eventually made...

Taste the Rainbow

This is not sponsored content - other colourful drops of happiness are available! But Skittles ticked all the boxes for us. Readily available, in our colourful shades that match our branding and even complete with a little S printed on each one. Plus, they do taste great. There are some major issues with purchasing Skittles from a supermarket; the looks you get when you fill 2 shopping baskets with their entire stock, explaining it all to your accountant and the fact that they come as a big mixed-up mess of flavours.

In order to create the graduated colour spectacle, we had to first divide all the different colours into single-file, which we can confirm was as painful and time-consuming as you think it was. We made sure everything was super clean, hands were washed, gloves worn and sweets handled with care.

Presents Come in Boxes

The master plan was to present sweets that were unmistakably from We Are Sweet. After a lot of searching, we found some cases with clear lids, reversible inserts and sensible dimensions for our gifts. The clear lids show the sweets in all their glory while the inserts mean that we could make the boxes just 1 sweet deep. This allowed us to recreate our colour gradient without fear of the postage journey deconstructing all our hard work. The added bonus was that these boxes fall within the Royal Mail Large Letter dimensions and can therefore be posted in a good old fashioned postbox with the correct stamp.

Printing Perfection

In an ideal world, we would have had the boxes screen printed or foil blocked but due to the limited quantity, we knew this would be a hand-crafted manual affair. We decided that plotted vinyl graphics would take full advantage of the clear lid. This is a great method for small runs but when vinyl artwork is small it doesn’t cut correctly and becomes a nightmare to apply. Luckily we wanted a clear, concise message and bold typefaces to represent this.

We produced a surplus of We Are Sweet vinyls and so a secret sticker was added to each box in the space at the bottom created by the insert. We won’t know if anyone found this easter egg until after we’ve published this article but the rattling of an empty sweet box should give it away!

The finished boxes certainly look professionally produced but there is an element of handmade charm to them as well. To help reduce the eye-balling and craftmanship required in creating the boxes, the other artwork was produced in full-colour to adhesive stickers that are quick and easy to apply. 

Stickers were used for the back of the packaging but also for the inside. When the sweets are consumed they slowly reveal a message on the insert guiding people to a Secret Santa URL on our website. You’ll have to see for yourself what we put there. We thought this was a fun way to interact with clients that really engaged with the sweet boxes.

Tasty Content

We really want our clients to enjoy the sweets and at least appreciate the effort that went into creating the boxes! But this is also a marketing exercise. We’ve been far more active on social media in 2019 and this felt like the ideal opportunity to flex our photography and video skills. This article isn’t supposed to say ‘look we made some sweet boxes’, we want it to demonstrate the care, attention and thinking we put into everything we create. 

We recorded every stage of the production but went all-out on staging some excessively festive scenes to showcase just how good the finished product looked. I’ll save the video for the end of the article but here are a few seasonal snaps of the sweeties in all their sensation.

Down the Chimney

Unfortunately, we couldn’t arrange for Santa to hand-deliver the sweets.  All of the boxes were individually wrapped in custom-printed wrapping paper that uses our colourful triangles gradient and topped with another branded vinyl. We printed labels for each for the lucky few that dodged the naughty list this year and posted them all off. We won’t know for sure how the big reveal will look but we’re confident the colours will stay in order and hopeful that a few clients make it through enough sweets to get to the secret URL. 

Conclusion

If nothing else the sweets gave us some content for another article! We think they look amazing and a few sneaky misplaced Skittles confirmed they taste as good as your childhood remembers. The production process was certainly hard work but we think it was worth it. The thought of doing more can wait until the New Year but we will be tweaking the design and messaging to suit more general marketing that we can use with prospective clients in direct mail campaigns. 

We hope everyone that receives their own Sweet Treat box really enjoys it, and if you didn’t make the cut, you’ll just have to work with us in 2020!

What’s the best corporate Christmas gift you’ve received?