For more than a decade, my studio has taken the orders that start the same way – a senior EA on the phone, sending something on an exec’s behalf, usually with about four minutes to make every decision that matters.
The flowers are rarely the problem. What decides whether a gesture lands is three decisions made before anything is ordered: the occasion, the timing and whose name goes on the card. Get those right and almost anything you send will land well. Get them wrong and the most expensive arrangement in the catalogue reads as careless.
You already run this judgement on email, diaries and introductions. Gifting deserves the same rigour, and it rewards it.
In whose name?
Start here, because it’s the decision most often skipped. The rule is simple – match the name on the card to the relationship, not the org chart.
If the recipient would text your executive directly, the card carries your exec’s name alone. If the relationship sits with a team, name the team. The company name is for company occasions, such as an office opening or a business anniversary. And a condolence is always signed by a person, never a brand.
One more rule, and it’s non-negotiable. Never sign your executive’s name to words they haven’t seen. Draft the message by all means but they approve it the same way they’d approve an email going out under their name. The test I’d apply: if the recipient mentions the card to your executive next week, does the conversation hold up?
Promotion, new baby, illness: match the gesture to the moment
A promotion goes to the office, and that’s deliberate. Part of the gift is that colleagues see it arrive. Time it for the first week in the new role rather than announcement day, when they’re buried in congratulations. A card in your executive’s name, with one specific line about why the promotion was deserved, will be remembered longer than the arrangement itself.
A new baby goes to the home, and later than you think. The first fortnight is chaos, and a delivery can sit on a doorstep unnoticed. Week three or four is when the rush of attention has passed and something arriving feels like being remembered rather than processed. Skip the hospital entirely. Stays are short and the family ends up carrying everything home. Follow the parents’ lead on names and details. If they haven’t announced, neither has your card.
Illness is the hardest of the three, because privacy sets every decision. Confirm what the person has chosen to share before anything is ordered. If they’ve kept the details private, don’t send a display to a desk in an open-plan office; a delivery to the home with a plain envelope respects the boundary they’ve drawn. The card comes from your executive personally, it never names the condition, and it asks for nothing. “No need to reply” is one of the kindest lines you can put in writing.
The condolence you should never delegate blindly
‘Blindly’ is the operative word. This is the one gesture where you need five minutes with your executive before you act, not a sign-off after.
Get three things from that conversation:
- How they knew the person
- What they actually want to say
- And whether they’re attending the service.
Then use their words on the card, however plain. “I’m so sorry. Margaret was kind to me when I was new here and I never forgot it” will mean more to a family than any line a stranger could compose. Boilerplate sympathy reads as exactly what it is.
Check the funeral notice before sending anything. Many families ask for donations in place of flowers and honouring that request is the gesture. If flowers are welcome, send them to the home rather than the service, where they arrive as one of dozens.
On timing: the ones families mention in thank-you notes are rarely the ones that arrived in the first week. They’re the ones that arrived in week three or four, when the callers had stopped and the house had emptied out. Grief outlasts the rush around it. A delivery that arrives after everyone else has moved on says the one thing that matters: we haven’t.
When a client gift reads as considered instead of corporate
The corporate default is abundance. A bigger arrangement, a better bottle or a heavier hamper. After years of watching what recipients do when deliveries land, the thing that makes someone stop and photograph a card is a specific line, not a bigger arrangement.
One remembered detail outperforms a doubled budget every time. “Congratulations on the Melbourne opening, we know what it took” lands harder than anything generic, whatever it’s attached to.
This is where you have an advantage no gifting catalogue can match: you already know these people. Keep a running note of the details that pass through your inbox (the renovation, the marathon, the new office) and spend one of them on the card.
Timing does the same work. A thank-you that arrives on signing day reads as protocol. The same gesture two weeks later, when nothing is owed, reads as sincerity.
A gesture sent on an executive’s behalf decides how that executive turns up in someone’s memory of a week the recipient will never forget. Every decision above is judgement work, and it sits with you. Done well, it’s some of the most visible judgement you’ll ever exercise.
