Upcycled Christmas gifts: when the employee present is already in your warehouse

The question comes up in most companies in September and turns urgent in November: what do we give our employees? With employee Christmas gifts, the search usually ends with something ordered in, something that looks respectable but has no connection to the company and is sitting in a drawer by January.

Yet the material for a better gift is often already in the building. Promotional products from expired campaigns, retired corporate fashion, surplus stock from the fan shop. These holdings are rarely seen as raw material, because accounting treats them as a disposal item rather than as inventory.

Employee Christmas gifts from your own stock

We work both as a fashion brand and as an upcycling service provider, and we have processed almost everything that accumulates inside companies: stadium banners, uniform shirts, exhibition tarpaulins, emergency service clothing, misprinted shirts.

For smaller quantities of material, cardholders, toiletry bags and belt bags work well as sustainable corporate gifts. If you have more material, you can have backpacks or duffle bags produced. From goods-in to delivery we need roughly 6 to 8 weeks, and production takes place in the EU.

Two projects that show how it runs

For the DFB we collected stadium banners from Cologne and developed bags and organisers from them. From the first idea to the product on the shelf it took 33 days.

At DHL, retired delivery uniforms became a collection of its own. It was received so well internally that it produced not only employee gifts but also a public campaign with more than 1,500 reactions and a press release of its own.

Why this works as a gift

An ordered corporate gift has no origin. A bag made from the banner that hung at the stadium last year does, and it explains itself the moment it is unwrapped. On request, every product receives a woven label indicating what it was made from.

This article deliberately covers the Christmas season. If you are planning independently of the season, for an anniversary or an onboarding pack, you will find the product selection in our article on sustainable employee gifts.