Gifting Trends: Friends Send a Quarter of All Gifts

Family gifting led the week, as it usually does. The surprise was who came second: friends sent a quarter of all gifts, and almost all of them were birthdays.

Friends made up 26% of this week's gifting. The pattern behind that number is consistent: a bracelet posted across two time zones, a gift card sent with a note about wishing they could be at the party. Birthday gifting took 43% of everything, its strongest slice in four weeks, and friends carried a big part of it.

A quarter of this week's gifts went from one friend to another.

New baby gifts climbed for a second week

Gifts for new parents grew again, taking 10% of all gifting. Many of them travelled a long way. Relatives in other states are sending hometown-themed presents to babies they have not met yet, which is a very specific and very lovely kind of impatience.

Geography adds a twist. In Australia, gifts for new parents sat second only to birthdays, ahead of everyday gifting entirely. In Britain, birthdays took nearly three quarters of the week and left little room for anything else. Same month, two completely different shelves.

Most gifts crossed a border

More than half of this week's gifting, 56%, left its home country. Gifts headed to London, Sydney, Dubai and Auckland, and the notes arrived in a lot of languages. Spanish led the writing outside English, with Turkish, French, Dutch, Arabic and Swedish all in the mix.

The shops behind that traffic were mostly jewelry counters and food and drink stores, which together handled about two fifths of the week. Small jewelry travels well: bracelets and earrings were among the most gifted items, and they fit in a padded envelope without losing any of the occasion.

There is one seasonal note worth flagging. Christmas advent calendars turned up in British gifting this week, bought in September with instructions to wait until December 1. Seasonal boxes are already moving.

What this means for merchants

Friend gifting and birthday gifting are the same business, and they never go out of season. A store that treats gift options as an everyday feature rather than a fourth-quarter one catches the biggest steady wave in gifting.

The cross-border half matters too. When over half of gifts land in another country, the gift message field and the wrapping options are read by someone shopping in their second language. Translated gift options and a visible gift message field turn that into an easy yes.