Two hundred hampers to two hundred addresses is a spreadsheet problem.
The gift itself is the easy part. The hard part is four hundred lines of address data, of which about eleven are wrong, and a delivery window that everybody has assumed is a week longer than it is.
Lead times, honestly.
| Quantity | Notice needed | Why | Latest for Christmas |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1–9 | 2–5 working days | Ordinary stock picking | 19 December |
| 10–49 | One week | A picking and packing problem, not a stock one | 12 December |
| 50–199 | Three weeks | The jars have to be made by somebody | 28 November |
| 200–499 | Six weeks | Nine producers, all small, all with other customers | 7 November |
| 500+ | Ten weeks, and a conversation first | At this size we are commissioning a production run | 1 October |
What actually has to happen.
You send the list
A CSV. Name, company, address lines, postcode, and a per-recipient message if you want one.
We validate it
Against the postcode file. About five per cent of any corporate list fails, and it is always the same five per cent.
You fix the failures
We send them back as a list rather than as a wall of errors. This takes a day and it always takes a day.
We confirm a dispatch date
One date for the whole run, because staggering two hundred hampers produces two hundred separate anxieties.
It ships
Tracked, in one release, with a manifest back to you showing every consignment number.
And then eleven of them go wrong
People move, people leave, people are on holiday. We handle it and we tell you which eleven.
What the file has to contain.
Required columns
- recipient_name
- The person. Not the department
- address_1, address_2, town, postcode
- Four columns. County is optional and we ignore it
- hamper
- One of the six names, or a configuration reference
- message
- Up to four hundred characters, or blank
Optional but useful
- company
- Printed on the label, which helps a postroom that is not meant to open it
- dry
- A yes or a no. Swaps the alcohol for the equivalent value, at no charge
- deliver_after
- A date. Useful if half the list is on leave
What we will refuse
- A workplace postroom, for anything alcoholic
- The recipient has to be carded at the door
- An address outside the UK, for alcohol or cheese
- Somebody else’s customs rules, not our policy
- A list with no named recipients
- A hamper addressed to a job title cannot be signed for
- A run promised faster than the producers can make it
- We will offer a different hamper instead
The file never leaves our systems, is used only for the run, and is deleted ninety days afterwards. It is other people’s home addresses and it is treated that way.
What goes wrong, every single time.
Somebody has left. On any list of two hundred, three or four people no longer work there, and the company sending the gift usually does not know until a hamper comes back.
Somebody has moved. Home addresses in a staff system are updated less often than anybody believes, and in a list of two hundred about six are a house the person left two years ago.
And somebody is on holiday, which is the one that produces a hamper sitting in a porch in December for nine days. The fix is the deliver_after column and almost nobody uses it.
None of that is fixable by us and all of it is predictable, which is why it is on this page rather than in an apologetic email on the twenty-first.
Two hundred home addresses is personal data, and it is not ours.
A corporate gift list is a file of employees’ home addresses. We are processing it on your behalf, it is used only for the run, it is not merged into anything, nobody on it is signed up to anything, and it is deleted after ninety days. If your legal team wants that in writing, they should ask, because they are right to.
At scale, questioned.
One dispatch date for the whole run, and a courier window of a day or two on top. A guaranteed single delivery date across two hundred addresses is not something any courier will promise honestly.
Yes, and about a third of them do. The second year is considerably easier because the list has been cleaned once.
They come back to us, we tell you which, and we hold them for thirty days in case you have a new address. After that they go to the staff room.
On the packaging and the handling, yes, from fifty upwards. Not on the food, because the producers are small and squeezing them is how the sixteen-mile radius stops working.
The other end of the same problem.
Giving your own staff something, and what HMRC will let you get away with.
