How DTC brands have optimized their corporate gifting programs

Brands with corporate gifting programs — like candle brand Anecdote and gardening startup Garenuity — say that these large orders are a big boost at a time when DTC advertising is expensive and noisy. However, there are also downsides — especially when it comes to retention. Unlike with standard online orders, it can be hard to collect customer data as the product is gifted to hundreds of unknown recipients. What’s more, it’s often difficult to find and bring these customers into a brand’s database, which also makes retargeting these people challenging in the future.

According to these startups, it took a few investments to make these programs successful in converting and retaining corporate clients throughout the year. Building an efficient corporate gifting program, for example, revolves around tech and website portals that make ordering simple, as well as inventory and fulfillment preparation to ensure bulk orders go out on time. 

Investing in an official program 

Shreya Aggarwal, founder of luxury candle brand Caftari, said that when she launched her brand in November 2023, she knew she wanted to make corporate and B-to-B orders a substantial part of the business.

In the first half of 2024, Caftari was generating about 25% of its revenue from corporate gift orders. But especially during the holidays, Aggarwal really wanted to boost the number of corporate orders because digital advertising costs targeting individual orders will likely spike.

“This is our first real holiday season, so I was shooting in the dark when forecasting demand,” Aggarwal said. Aggarwal began developing the B-to-B business through partnerships earlier this year, starting with spas and hotels like Equinox Hotels and Signia by Hilton. That exposure then led to inbound interest from corporate clients looking for bulk gift orders.

To prepare for this holiday season, Caftari moved to a new fulfillment center and partnered with gifting platforms to acquire new customers. The platforms included Wishlist, Elfster and Loop & Tie, which helped bring Caftari several big corporate clients, including Hello Fresh. 

One of the downsides, however, is the cost structure. For example, Aggarwal said she began working with other brands who included her candles in corporate gift packages, but these brands sell Caftari’s candles at wholesale prices. Similarly, with the corporate gifting platforms, the margins end up being relatively tight.

“Sure, we’re pushing a lot of inventory, but, ultimately, the fulfillment and shipping eat into it,” she said. Some platforms also allow brands to advertise on their home page for better visibility. Aggarwal said that these factors make corporate gift orders closer in nature to wholesale accounts than DTC orders.

To improve margins, she is trying to strengthen these existing relationships and leverage them to attract new B-to-B customers through inbound requests. Aggarwal also said improving fulfillment logistics will create more efficiency as the gifting business grows.

At the end of the day, Aggarwal said, the biggest downside is that the brand doesn’t own the final customer. When working with a gifting platform, by design, the brand receives little customer information. “For example, we don’t have their email address to retarget them and add them to our customer base,” she said. “So even though we worked with Hello Fresh through Loop & Tie, we don’t know who got our product.”

“What I’m doing now is trying to reverse-engineer a customer profile of whoever received the product,” Aggarwal said.

Automating the ordering process 

Julie Maskulka, founder and CEO of Anecdote Candles, said the brand’s corporate gifting strategy has evolved over the past few years. Like its namesake, Anecdote specializes in short anecdotes that describe the candle’s scent, which makes the product ripe for customization.

In 2022, the company created a corporate gifting program that allowed customers to create their own customized candles based on a menu of scents and label colors. “At the time, it was a very manual high-touch, white glove service to offer customized candles,” Maskulka said. 

The company was focused on bringing in more corporate customers this year.

“This is the first year where we did really targeted outreach,” she said. Anecdote launched a referral program for existing corporate clients. The company also decided to target niche communities that don’t fit the typical corporate client profile, betting that there would be less competition with other brands. These include businesses like boarding schools and book publishers.

Maskulka said this year, she wanted to remove the friction that comes with walking clients through custom bulk orders. That’s why she built a candle menu to streamline the number of combinations to choose from.

Maskulka also sought to streamline the corporate gifting business this year by automating the customization process. “The copy was the hardest thing to explain, so the other big investment we made this year was building our [own] generator, like an ‘AnecdoteGPT,”’ Maskulka said. That has eliminated a lot of back and forth with customers when designing custom candles that Anectode then produces in its own factory in Brooklyn.

The tech investment has paid off so far. As of December 2024, corporate gifting makes up about 19% of Anectode’s sales, compared to 7% last year. “And our re-order rate is about 18%,” she said.

Over the last couple of years, Anecdote’s corporate clients have helped it gain awareness. This helped generate leads for future orders. “We do a lot of custom orders for advertising, branding and graphic design agencies because they understand what we’re offering, and it’s fun to them, too,” she said.

Balancing two business models 

Gardenuity, which sells patio container gardens, has become popular among employers looking for more unique takes on corporate gifts. Since launching in 2017, these gifts have come to make up about 15% of the brand’s overall revenue, according to founder Donna Letier. She also said the corporate gifting business has grown every single year.

According to Letier, there are distinct customer journeys for both corporate clients and DTC customers. Corporate gifting requires a consultative sales approach, longer sales cycles and personalized account management by the company’s channel partner sales team. 

“The biggest challenge in growing a corporate gifting business is mastering the art of scaling personalization while staying operationally lean,” Letier said. For example, the company is continuously investing in product development and inventory expansion to cater to corporate clients. That has included building two websites, Gardenuityforbusiness.com and Gardenuity.com, to service the two different customer bases. “We have also streamlined our logistics and fulfillment capabilities, so we can move very personalized living gifts with ease,” Letier said.

Overall, bulk orders by B-to-B customers can provide a big boost to startups. But founders say they are not going all-in on the tactic, as there are still a lot of benefits to attracting more DTC customers.

“I’m trying to make the business more equitable in terms of both the gifting and the consumer side,” Aggarwal said. “That’s so we can own the customer journey, know why they bought the product and use that for product improvement.”

It boils down to a tradeoff. With corporate gifting programs, “the average order value is obviously higher, but those recipients remain an enigma,” Maskulka said.