Best Personalized Gifts For This Holiday Season

Tailored gift experiences can create a deeper connection with the recipient, emphasize your messaging or boost your brand. Bespoke gifts leave a lasting impression, and finding the correct type of packaging will make the gift more alluring. Packaging will keep items contained and intact and create an exciting experience as the recipient unboxes their gift. With the right selection, a customized box can form part of the gift by serving a functional purpose, like being used as a storage item. 

A lot of work goes into personalized gifting, from selecting items that resonate with the recipient to designing packaging and tying everything together with a beautiful presentation. Following our personalized gift guide will make the process quick and enjoyable.

Best Personalized Gifts for Every Occasion

If you are planning a personalized gift for an employee or coworker, make it extra special by relying on shared experiences. Some of our favorite ideas include:

• Birthdays: Gather various souvenirs or items from shared experiences and add them to a customized mailer box printed with photos related to these memories. 
• Weddings: Give the happy couple wine, either from their wedding or another experience where they shared a specific brand. You can create a beautiful minimalist design on a Gable box, using their wedding colors to make it extra special.
• Anniversaries: Source a customized star map using location coordinates and the date their journey started. Roll it up in a square tube box to protect the printout, especially if you are shipping it.
• Holidays: Create a custom family recipe book with dishes and stories that have been passed down in your family. Package it in a literature mailer box designed with old family pictures from past festive season gatherings.

Organizations can enhance employee morale and brand recognition and show client appreciation with these gift ideas:

• Team-building events: Welcome your employees to team-building events with apparel, reusable water bottles, custom treats or a care package for overnight stays. You can slide the gifts into a branded retail box and focus the print design on the box on the event theme. 
• Client thank-you gifts: Show your clients appreciation with unique gifts related to their business or consumables like coffee, beer or wine, which you can deliver in a presentable gable box with a handle.
• New employee welcome kits: Treat your new employees with company apparel, hats, shirts, notebooks and a water bottle in a shipping box with your branding and some motivational welcome notes on the design.
• Wellness incentives: If your business is running any form of wellness program, consider adding health snacks, tumblers or fitness gear into a branded shipping box with designs to support the initiative. You could also add fitness tips, quotes or recipes to this design.

To make the most of customized boxes for personalized gifts, consider client milestones, holiday gifts, birthdays and retirement gifts.

Custom Box Designs

The first thing your recipient sees is the packaging. A beautiful or personalized design builds more excitement around the gift, so special attention to customization matters. This is also a great opportunity for businesses to use the packaging to enhance brand recognition. 

Design Tips

When brainstorming design ideas for a customized box, try to stick with matching themes that align with the occasion, whether it is a birthday, work anniversary or condolence gift. Consider using seasonal elements like motifs or colors to keep the packaging timely and relevant. 

Popular Trends

Up your packaging game by opting for one of these trends when you design custom boxes:

• Interactive designs with a game or some fun anecdotes.
• Augmented designs with QR codes that can take the recipient to something online like a digital gift card.

Sustainable and Eco-Friendly Presentation

Sustainability is becoming increasingly important, whether you are gifting to someone in a professional or personal capacity. You can prioritize using eco-friendly inks, match packaging size to your gifts for reduced material use, opt for reusable packaging or use biodegradable and compostable packaging materials and inserts. These options, like corrugated cardboard, are already increasing in popularity and are expected to grow at a 7.2% compound annual growth rate by 2032.

DIYpack understands the importance of sustainable packaging, so we have the following eco-friendly options to support your efforts. Our corrugated shipping boxes are compostable, recyclable and repurposable. They are also Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) sustainable material sourcing standard-certified. Our custom packaging creation allows you to find a perfectly sized box without material wastage during manufacturing.

How to Create a DIY Gift Box With DIYpack

Boost your gift's personal touch with unique packaging options. With DIYpack, you can add custom designs, patterns, colors and even messaging that reflects the recipient's personality. Our system lets you customize every design aspect of your gift boxes, even if you are not a graphic designer. We offer guidelines for designing and printing, which areas of the box are print-safe, how to navigate image resolution and how to adjust your color profiles for Kraft versus white materials. There are even instructional videos on these topics to give you the confidence you need to start designing.

Gift Presentation Ideas

Wrap up gifts that match the recipient's preferences and send them off in a customized gift box with some final touches to show the effort you put into this do-it-yourself assembly. These are some simple and meaningful ideas to use:

• Write a note: Add a handwritten note to the gift, whether it's for a close friend, family member or client. This extra attention to detail really shows how much you value the recipient.
• Use layers: Include multiple layers of wrapping to packaging to build suspense and help the recipient get excited as they unwrap their gift. 
• Little details: Incorporate surprise elements like confetti, candy or memorable photographs inside the box.

Explore DIYpack for All Your Custom Packaging Needs

Packaging has a twofold role in gift-giving. It offers protection by safeguarding your gift during transport and handling. A thoughtful design also creates a fun unboxing experience, which adds to the gift's significance. Whatever gift you are putting together, finding the right manufacturing partner for your gift box designs is crucial.

At DIYpack, we have over 60 years of experience in direct manufacturing. We partner with organizations that prioritize sustainability, like the New Indy paper plant and our corrugator, Encorr. We also run an internal green program to keep our manufacturing processes efficient. Whether you need to order bulk quantities for client gifts or just a few boxes for personal presents, we have no minimum order quantities. You can even order only one unit. 

Design your own packaging for personalized gifts today. Enjoy high-quality packaging, outside-inside or both-side printing and short turnaround times.