Gifting Trends: Friends Carried the Birthday Week

Family usually leads gifting. This week friends came close enough to make it interesting: nearly a quarter of all gifting came from friends, and most of it was aimed at a birthday.

The shape of those gifts is worth noticing. Friends in Australia and New Zealand spent the week clubbing together, sending flowers with macarons, puzzles and gift cards to people they could not celebrate with in person. One gift, several names on the note.

Nearly one in four gifts this week came from a friend.

Thank-you gifting keeps growing

The other movement this week was quieter. Thank-you gifting grew for a fourth week in a row, which makes it the most consistent trend in the current mix. It is not a seasonal spike; it has been building steadily.

The gifts behind it are modest. Coffee, honey, a small plant, something that fits on a desk. And the relationships behind it lean professional more often than the rest of gifting does, which is to say people are thanking the colleagues who covered for them.

Appreciation gifting also travels differently by country. In Canada, thank-you gifts sat close behind birthdays, alongside get-well gifts and gifts of comfort. In Britain, birthdays took nearly six in ten gifts and left less room for everything else.

Jewelry counters led the shop mix

About one in five gifts this week came from jewelry, luggage and leather goods shops, more than any other kind of shop. Bracelets and earrings led the way out the door, with food and drink shops close behind on the strength of care packages.

Those small boxes travelled a long way. More than half of this week's gifting happened outside the United States, and shops in Dubai and India were part of the flow along with the usual stops in London and Sydney. Siblings in India were sending bracelets ahead of Raksha Bandhan, which lands this Friday.

Language followed the map. Gift notes arrived in Spanish, Turkish, French, Arabic, Italian and Dutch, a reminder that a gifting experience written only in English quietly asks a lot of the shopper.

What this means for merchants

Friend gifting and thank-you gifting share a habit: the decision is fast and the message matters more than the wrapping. Both are helped by a gift option that appears early, in the cart or on the product page, and a message field with enough room for four people to sign.

Two dates are close enough to plan around. Father's Day in Australia and New Zealand falls on September 6 and shoppers there are already moving, and Mid-Autumn Festival follows in four weeks across China, South Korea and East Asia.