Services
It's September, which means somewhere in your company, someone just got handed the holiday gift list. Maybe that's you. You've got a spreadsheet with 200 or 800 names on it, a budget that got approved without much discussion, and a vague sense that last year's gift didn't land the way you hoped.
So you start calling around and here's what usually happens.
The swag companies will absolutely sell you the gift. They have catalogs, warehouses, fulfillment, the whole operation. What they can't do is write the note. The best they'll offer is a printed card with a font that's supposed to look handwritten, or a blank card they'll drop in the box for you to fill out later. Which means at some point in early December, somebody at your company is sitting at a conference room table with a pen and a stack of 200 cards, and that person is not happy about it.
The handwritten card companies have the opposite problem. They'll write your cards beautifully. Then they'll mail all 200 of them to your office in one box so you can pair them with the gifts yourself. But that still means someone has to match every card to address label.
Why Can't Your Swag Company Write The Note?
Because it's a completely different business.
A promotional products company is built around sourcing, warehousing, and printing. Their machines put logos on mugs. That's a volume operation and they're good at it. Writing an individual message with a real pen, on a real card, addressed to a specific person, is not a printing problem.
It requires different equipment, a different process, and a different company altogether.
There's a corporate gifting guide ranking on page one right now that tells readers handwritten notes stop being practical once your list goes past 50 people. That's not really true, but I understand why they wrote it. From where they sit, it isn't practical because they don't have a the capabilities.
The result is that the note gets treated as an afterthought, and the note is the part that does the work. The gift gets the box opened. The card is what makes the person feel like a human being thought about them.
What Actually Has To Happen Between "Send Gifts" And A Box On Someone's Desk?
More than most people expect. This is the part that surprises the marketing manager who thought this would take an afternoon.
Somebody has to clean the list. Not just deduplicate it, but verify the addresses are current.
Somebody has to source the gift, at the quantity you need, arriving on a date that works.
Somebody has to write the messaging. Not "Happy Holidays from the team at Acme," but something that sounds like a person wrote it and mentions something specific.
Somebody has to write the cards, address the envelopes, assemble the packages, pack them, label them, and ship them.
That's at least 3 vendors if you piece it together yourself, and you become the project manager for all of them during the busiest month of your year. Or it's one vendor that does the whole thing, which is a much shorter list of companies than you'd think.
When Do You Actually Need To Start?
If you're reading this in September, you're in good shape. October is fine but tightening. If you call in mid-November wanting 500 packages out before Christmas, the honest answer from most people who do this well is going to be no, or yes with a rush fee and fewer options.
Here's the rough shape of the timeline.
List cleaning and address verification runs a week or two depending on how messy your data is.
Gift sourcing depends entirely on the item and availability
Messaging and card design usually takes a round or two of revisions
Then writing, assembly, and fulfillment
Then transit
Not to mention, December is a terrible time to arrive. Everything shows up in December.
Pro Tip: If you want your package to be noticed, plan for it to arrive around Thanksgiving or push it to January and send a new year note instead. Nobody sends anything in January, which is exactly why it'll stand out for all the right reasons.
What Does It Cost To Send A Gift With A Handwritten Card?
For a real gift with real assembly and a real handwritten card, plan on somewhere in the range of $15 to $50 per package all in, depending on what's in the box and the associated shipping costs.
The card, the assembly, the packaging, and the shipping are relatively fixed. A useful, well chosen item at $5 and a useful, well chosen item at $30 cost about the same to write, pack, and send.
Scale the item to what the account is worth. A $50 package to a client relationship worth six figures is not extravagant, it's proportionate.
What If Your Clients Can't Accept Gifts?
This comes up rather often in our line of work.
Government employees frequently can't accept anything at all, including lunch. Healthcare has its own compliance rules, and some organizations have their own internal policies that won't let them accept an item with clear monetary value attached. Publicly traded companies often have internal gift limits.
None of this means you can't send anything. It means the card does more of the work, and the campaign needs to be structured accordingly.
What Should You Ask Before You Hire Someone?
Five questions that will sort out most of the field quickly.
Do you write the card and assemble the package, or do you ship the cards to me?
Do you verify addresses before anything gets sent, and what does that cost?
Who writes the message, and will you help me write it?
What's your real cutoff date for holiday delivery?
What happens if something merges wrong or arrives damaged?
Ready To Get This Off Your Plate?
We do the whole dang thing. Data cleaning, gift sourcing, messaging, real handwritten cards written with real pens, assembly, and fulfillment out of our own space. You tell us the outcome you want and the list you want to reach, and we handle the rest.
The best part? Strategy comes with every campaign and you get a seasoned team in running these exact types of campaigns.
If you're working on your holiday program right now, this is the right week to start the conversation. If you're reading this in December, call anyway, and chances are we can pull off a Christmas miracle.
Email hello@ghosthandwriter.com or book a call.
want us to handle it?
Tell us the outcome. We’ll handle the rest.
Handwritten cards and lumpy mail, planned, written, packed, and shipped for you.
