A client renewed, or referred you two accounts, or took your call at 9pm on a Sunday during a bad week. You want to acknowledge it. You also know that some companies log every gift over a threshold, that a few sectors bar them outright, and that whatever you send is going to sit on a desk where twelve other people can see it and form an opinion about your firm.
What is appropriate, and what is not
Check the threshold before you shop. Many corporate policies cap gifts at $25 or $50 per person per year, and government, healthcare, and financial contacts often have hard limits or outright bans. Sending something over the line creates a disclosure form for the person you were trying to thank, which is the opposite of a favor. When in doubt, send to the office and address it to the team, since shared perishables are treated differently from personal gifts under most policies.
Food that gets shared solves the visibility problem. A bottle of something goes home in a bag and nobody sees it. A box opened in a break room means eleven people learn your name, and the client gets social credit for the relationship rather than a private obligation.
Do not send in the third week of December. Every vendor sends then, the mail room is overwhelmed, and your box is the ninth. Send in January, or in the week after a project closes, when nothing else is competing.
Keep the branding off it. A logo turns a gift into collateral. Put your firm's name in the handwritten card, once, at the bottom.
What to send
If you'd rather bake it: usually don't. Plenty of offices will not put unlabeled homemade food in a shared kitchen, and a hospital or a bank will not put it out at all. If the relationship is close enough that homemade reads as warmth rather than a liability, gingerbread biscotti in December are the version that survives the rules — sealed, labeled, ingredients written on the box. /ricette/.
What to write
- Thank you for the referral to Hargrove. That call changed our quarter.
- For the team. You all made the March deadline survivable.
- You picked up the phone at 9pm on a Sunday. That is not standard and I noticed.
- No agenda, nothing to sign. Thank you for a good year of work. — Dana Ruiz, Ruiz & Co.
- Sending this in January on purpose, so it isn't competing with everyone else's December.
12 more lines for this occasion →
Timing
January beats December. The second and third weeks of January have almost no competing mail, and a thank-you that arrives then is attributed to you rather than to the season. Otherwise, send within five business days of the thing you are thanking them for, while the memory is still specific. Ship to arrive Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday — Monday mail rooms are backed up and Friday boxes sit over the weekend. Confirm the office is staffed before sending to a company on a hybrid schedule; a box addressed to a floor that is empty on Fridays can sit at a front desk for four days. Order five to seven business days out, because most of the bakeries at /regali/ bake in batches twice a week and a same-week order gets you whatever they have rather than what you picked.
This page names no brand and earns nothing from what you decide. The bakeries that ship are listed alphabetically by state; our method is here, including what we would have to disclose if that ever changed.