Diwali corporate gifting in India is enormous and almost entirely interchangeable. Your employees will receive a dry-fruit box from you and four more from vendors, and by the second week of the festival nobody can remember which came from where. That is the actual problem to solve, and spending more does not solve it.
The three ways it goes wrong
It arrives in a pile. Yours is the fifth hamper that week. Whatever you spent, it is now one of five.
It is about the company, not the year. A branded object says where someone works, which they know. It carries no information about what the year was.
It arrives late. Diwali is a hard deadline in a month where every courier in India is saturated. A gift arriving after the festival is a gift about a festival that has finished.
Everything below is aimed at one of those three.
What actually gets remembered
Something about the year the team had. A record of the launches, the offsites, the people who joined. Nobody else can send that, which solves the pile problem outright.
Something the household uses. Diwali gifts go home. A gift that works for the family rather than for the employee is remembered by more people.
Something with one element varied per person. Same object, their name or their start date inside. The unit cost barely moves and it stops being a batch.
Something modest and early. Arriving a week before, when it is the first rather than the fifth, beats arriving on the day with more spent on it.
| Idea | Per head | Ours |
|---|---|---|
| 30 polaroid-style prints of the year | ₹270 | ₹270 |
| An 8-page magazine of the team’s year | ₹499 | ₹499 |
| One shared album for the office | Split across the team | ₹1,299–2,299 |
| A magazine with a varied page per person | ₹499–699 | ₹499–699 |
Flat ₹70 delivery per address.
Budgets
Most companies land between ₹300 and ₹1,500 a head, decided far more by headcount than by generosity. Diwali does not change the arithmetic — it changes the competition, because everyone else is also sending something.
At a hundred people, ₹500 a head is ₹50,000 and the gift is competing with four other hampers. At the same total spent on one shared object plus thirty prints each, it is competing with nothing.
Corporate gifting budget per employee →
The timing problem, which is severe at Diwali
5 to 14 days from order to doorstep, 5 to 12 to Delhi NCR. We dispatch once a week, on Mondays, so ordering by a Friday rather than over a weekend saves a full week.
In the Diwali fortnight, courier networks across India are at their yearly peak and the upper end of that range is the one to plan against. Add your own collection time for addresses in front of it.
There is a whole piece on the backwards calculation, because this is the single commonest failure in corporate gifting.
When to place a Diwali order →
Gifting outward: clients and vendors
Different rules entirely. Client gifting at Diwali is the one time of year when a gift is unremarkable rather than notable — which is an advantage if their policy is strict, and a disadvantage if you wanted it noticed.
Send to the office, keep it modest, and address it to the company rather than the individual.
Client gifting without breaking compliance rules →
When to do something else
When the year was bad. Layoffs, a difficult stretch, a team that shrank. A celebratory record of that year reads badly. Something simple and generous is the honest answer.
When the team is four months old. Nothing to record yet. Buy something good and ordinary.
When it is a week away. Made-to-order will not make it through a saturated courier network. Buy off a shelf this year and plan properly for the next.
Above about a hundred units. A volume vendor will beat us on unit price and turnaround.
Frequently asked
What is a good Diwali gift for employees in India? Something specific to the year the team had, rather than a branded object or a hamper — those arrive in a pile of five and none of them is remembered.
How much do companies spend per employee at Diwali? Usually ₹300 to ₹1,500 a head, driven mostly by headcount. The competition rather than the budget is what makes Diwali gifting hard.
When should we order Diwali corporate gifts? Earlier than feels necessary. Courier networks peak during the festival fortnight, so plan against the upper end of the 5-to-14-day window plus your own collection time.
Should Diwali gifts be branded? On the packaging, yes. On the object, usually not — it makes the gift about the company to someone who already works there.
What if we gift both employees and clients? Treat them as separate exercises. Client gifting has policy constraints that internal gifting does not.
Part of our guide to gifting for large teams. See also: when to place a Diwali order and the Indian festival gifting calendar.
For Diwali: Corporate & bulk gifting · Photo magazines from ₹499 · Polaroid prints from ₹270