Gift Sentiment Trends: Love and Kindness Split the Week

Grandparents sent birthday gifts to grandchildren. Daughters sent birthday love to their mothers. Families welcomed new babies with gifts and long notes. Almost all of it came down to two feelings.

Notes full of love led gifting at 35% this week, and kind, caring notes landed half a step behind. Between them they left barely any room for anything else, which tells you something about what people reach for when they buy a gift for someone they already know well.

Two feelings carried nearly seven in ten gifts this week.

Appreciation is the one thing still growing

The week was quieter overall, and most feelings eased with it. Gratitude did not. Notes full of appreciation reached 8% of gifting and have grown every week this month, the only steady climb in the mix.

Geography backs it up. In Canada, thank-you gifts sat second only to birthdays, ahead of just-because gifts and get-well gifts. Colleagues, friends and neighbours are the ones driving it, and the gifts are small: a bottle, a box of something good, a card that does the talking.

For merchants, a rising thank-you habit is easier to serve than a holiday. It has no date, so it needs the gifting option to simply be there whenever someone decides today is the day to say it.

New homes brought the can't-wait energy

The third feeling worth watching is excitement, at 11% of gifting. Much of it belongs to friends congratulating each other on new homes and sending wine or small plants to help the place feel lived in.

It also travelled. More than half of this week's gifting went to somewhere other than the United States, arriving in Spanish, Turkish, French and Arabic alongside English. Britain leaned hard into birthdays, at 65% of its gifting, while Australia gave nearly a quarter of its week to seasonal gifts ahead of Father's Day on September 6.

The things people gifted tell the same story. Cards, wrap and boxes topped the list this week, ahead of any single piece of jewelry. When the feeling is big, the packaging gets a promotion.

What this means for merchants

Two thirds of gifting runs on love and kindness, which means the message field is not a nice extra. It is where the gift actually happens. Make it easy to find, easy to type in, and available in the language the shopper is already browsing in.

Then plan for the quiet growth. Thank-you gifting has climbed all month with no occasion pushing it, and celebration gifting spikes whenever someone gets keys to a new place. Both reward stores that offer wrapping and a note at every step, from the product page to checkout, rather than treating gifting as a seasonal campaign.