Welcome New Employees with Custom Swag

What Belongs in the Kit

Apparel is the anchor. A well-made quarter-zip, hoodie, or tee is the piece a new hire is most likely to wear in public, which makes it the piece worth spending on. Cheap apparel is the fastest way to signal the opposite of what a welcome kit is meant to signal, and people can tell within one wash.

Desk items are the second layer: a good notebook, a pen that writes properly, a laptop sticker, a decent insulated bottle or mug. These get used daily for years and cost very little. The bottle in particular has an unusually long life in an office and keeps doing its job long after the kit is forgotten.

Then there’s the piece specific to you. A book the founder recommends, a local product from the city you’re headquartered in, a handwritten card from the team. This is the item people actually mention when they describe their first day, and it’s almost always the cheapest thing in the box.

Sizing Without the Back and Forth

Apparel sizing is where most onboarding programs stall. Asking for a size in the offer paperwork feels awkward, guessing produces waste, and ordering a spread means holding inventory somebody has to manage.

The practical answer is to collect it in the pre-start paperwork alongside everything else you already ask for, framed as part of the welcome rather than an HR field. Almost nobody objects. For companies that would rather not ask, we can ship a kit with the non-apparel items and let the new hire redeem apparel from your store in their own size during their first week.

Because we hold the stock rather than you, an unusual size is a normal order rather than a special one, and nothing sits in a cupboard because one person left.

Remote and Distributed Starts

Remote onboarding raised the stakes on new hire swag considerably. When someone’s first day has no building, no desk, and no team lunch, a box arriving at their home is one of the only physical signals that they’ve joined something real.

We ship to home addresses domestically and internationally, on the date you specify rather than the date the order was placed. For distributed teams we can hold kits by region so the shipping cost and the transit time stay sensible, which matters more than most companies expect when hiring across borders.

The detail worth getting right is arrival timing. A kit that lands ahead of the start date lets someone open it in their own time and turn up on day one already wearing the shirt. One that arrives during week three has missed the moment entirely.

Keeping It Off Your Team’s Plate

The hidden cost of an onboarding kit program is almost never the products. It’s the recurring administrative time: tracking start dates, checking stock, packing boxes, chasing a courier, fielding the message about a wrong size.

A managed program removes that. You tell us a name, a size, an address, and a date, either through your store or by connecting your HRIS so new hires trigger automatically. The kit ships. Nobody on your side touches a box or opens a spreadsheet.

For companies hiring at volume, we can pre-assemble kits in batches so releasing one involves no production time at all. For companies hiring occasionally, the same store sits there costing nothing between orders.

What It Costs

You pay for product and decoration. There is no setup fee, no storage fee, no monthly platform fee, and no minimum order, so a company hiring four people a year runs the same program as one hiring four hundred.

What a kit costs depends almost entirely on the apparel and whether a bag is involved. We build to a number you give us rather than presenting a catalog and letting the total assemble itself.

Kits for Interns, Contractors, and Returning Staff

New hire swag doesn’t only apply to permanent full-time starters. Intern cohorts arrive all at once and leave with an opinion of your company that they share with an entire graduating class, which makes a summer intake one of the most worthwhile kits you can send. Contractors and agency staff who sit inside your team for six months notice whether they were included.

The same applies to people returning from extended leave. A small kit on the week someone comes back from parental leave or a sabbatical costs very little and lands at a moment when belonging is genuinely in question.

Because everything runs from one store and one inventory, these variations are a different pick list rather than a separate program. You can set a different kit for interns, a lighter one for contractors, and a return-to-work version, and order any of them without a new conversation.

Reviewing the Kit Once a Year

Kits drift. An item gets added for a reason nobody remembers, a supplier changes a garment without telling anyone, and three years later you are shipping something that no longer represents the company. Put a short review in the calendar annually.

The useful question is not what should we add, it is what should come out. Ask a handful of people who joined in the last year what they still have and what went straight in a drawer. The answers are usually consistent and usually surprising, and removing one dead item funds an upgrade on a live one.

Getting Started

Tell us how many people you hire in a year, where they’re located, and what you’d want in the box. We’ll come back with two or three kit options at different price points, with real per-kit numbers and samples of the apparel.

Nothing is committed until you’ve held the pieces. Request a demo and we’ll build a proposed new hire kit for your company.