New hire onboarding gifts and welcome kits
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New hire onboarding gifts
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New hire welcome gift ideas
Build a new hire welcome kit
A new hire welcome kit is a designed experience, and every detail shapes how a new employee feels about your company before they’ve even finished their first day.
What to put in a new hire kit
A new hire onboarding kit usually mixes three types of items:
- Branded gear employees can use in their personal lives
- Functional items that help employees do their job
- Culture items that tell employees about your company
A welcome letter or printed insert rounds out the experience without adding much cost.
How Anthem builds kits
Here’s what goes into a full kit build at Anthem:
- Custom packaging design: Branded boxes, tissue paper, and inserts engineered to create a real unboxing moment
- Kit assembly: All items picked, packed, and quality-checked as a single unit
- Branded inserts: Printed welcome letters, brand guides, or culture cards that add a personal touch
- Cohesive product curation: Items selected to work together, so the kit feels intentional
- Scalable builds: Whether you’re onboarding 100 people or 10,000, the kit stays consistent
Our packaging design team can develop the full unboxing experience, or we can work from an existing brand system.
Three ways to build your onboarding gifts
Enjoy total flexibility. Here are three approaches for different budgets, timelines, and brand goals.
Quality blanks with custom decoration
Source from a deep catalog of high-quality blank products, then decorate them with your logo, colors, and artwork. Fast turnaround, broad product selection, and a clean finished result.
- Most cost-effective option
- Largest product variety
- Standard decoration: embroidery, screen printing, patches, sublimation
- Mockups in 3 – 5 days
Best for: Companies that need a quality branded welcome kit on a limited budget or timeline.
Premium brand co-runs
Put your logo on gear from Nike, Patagonia, Yeti, Carhartt, Under Armour, and other labels. These runs carry brand equity that generic blanks can’t match, and they tell new hires you invest in quality.
- Access to 50+ premium brand partners
- Eco-conscious options available
- Co-branded finishes, including custom labels, hang tags, and interior branding
- Limited runs available with select partners
Best for: Companies where brand perception matters and the kit needs to feel premium on unboxing.
Custom stitch-and-sew construction
We build the product from scratch, from the fabric and construction to every seam and label, giving you a fully proprietary item that no one else can buy off a shelf.
- Total control over materials, silhouette, color, and construction
- Custom hardware, woven labels, and interior detailing
- Factory-level runs for brands that want to own their product line
- Longer lead times; best discussed during the discovery call
Best for: Brands building a merchandise line or a kit that needs to stand apart from anything on the market.
Co-brand your new hire gifts
A new hire who receives a Patagonia vest or a Yeti tumbler with your logo gets two quality signals: a brand they already trust, and the brand they’re joining.
Our partner catalog includes Nike, Patagonia, Yeti, Carhartt, Under Armour, Rhone, and more. We can run limited co-branded quantities with select partners or pull from standard minimums across the full catalog.
Brand partners
How we brand your onboarding gifts
Fulfillment options for new hire gifts
Bulk shipping
Kits are assembled, boxed, and shipped to a single location. Your team handles internal distribution from there.
- Lower per-unit shipping cost
- Simple coordination on our end
- Best for in-office onboarding programs
Dropshipping
Each kit ships to the new hire’s home or office address. No internal inventory, no reshipping, no guessing who got what.
- Removes all logistics from your People Ops team
- Covers remote, hybrid, and in-office employees equally
- Scales from one kit to thousands without process changes
Swag store
New hires receive a link to a branded online store, choose their kit items, and have everything shipped to their address. The store handles the fulfillment automatically, using the same dropshipping infrastructure, so you don’t manage a single shipment.
- Self-serve model: no admin overhead once the store is live
- New hires pick sizes and preferences themselves
- Easy to update the catalog as your product mix changes
How to order new hire onboarding gifts
- Discovery call: We talk through your kit goals, product preferences, headcount, budget, timeline, and fulfillment needs.
- Graphic preparation: We receive your branding visuals and prepare them for use. If you don’t have high-quality graphics, our logo design and merchandise design services can fill in the gaps.
- Mockups: Our team produces visual mockups of each item in the kit, typically within 3 – 5 days of the discovery call. You review and give feedback before anything goes to production.
- Approval and sampling: We can produce physical samples for high-volume programs or fully custom builds before committing to the full run.
- Production: Standard production runs 30 – 35 days. Custom stitch-and-sew builds and programs involving factory-level construction have longer lead times, which we confirm during discovery.
- Kit assembly and packaging: Items or kits get packed into branded boxes with inserts, and go through a quality check before they leave our facility.
- Fulfillment: New hire gifts ship using your chosen fulfillment method.
Anthem builds and manages corporate gifting programs for employees, clients, stakeholders, and all occasions. We can combine new-hire gifting with other programs to reduce cost and logistical complexity.
New hire gifts FAQs
What is the minimum order quantity for new hire welcome gifts?
Minimums vary by product. Most custom apparel and accessories start at 44 to 100 units, but we also produce small orders and single items at higher prices. Kit programs that mix multiple products may have per-item minimums that we confirm during the discovery call. We work with companies of all sizes, from small startups building their first kit to enterprise teams with continuous hiring needs.
Can new hire gifts be personalized for each employee?
You can order apparel items in individual sizes when you collect size preferences during onboarding. We can also include printed inserts with the employee’s name if desired.
What industries use new hire welcome gifts most?
New hire welcome gifts are common across technology, finance, healthcare, hospitality, and professional services, but any company with a defined onboarding process benefits from them. Companies with strong employer brands or competitive hiring environments tend to invest more in gift quality, using premium branded gear to differentiate the offer before a new hire even starts. See our industries page for more information.
Can we include eco-friendly or sustainable products in a new hire gift?
Yes. Our brand partner catalog includes sustainability-focused labels like Patagonia, Allmade, and United by Blue, which use recycled materials and responsible manufacturing. We can also source blank products made from organic cotton and recycled polyester. If sustainability is a priority for your brand, mention it during the discovery call, and we’ll build your onboarding gift selection around it.
Do you help with design if we don’t have existing artwork?
Our merchandise design and logo design teams can develop or adapt artwork for any item in your new hire gift program. If your existing brand assets aren’t production-ready, we can prepare them for decoration. Companies going through a rebrand often use new hire gift production as an opportunity to debut updated visuals across multiple items at once.
Can different roles or departments receive different gifts?
Yes. We can manage multiple gift configurations under a single program, with consistent packaging across all of them, so every new hire gets a deliberate, on-brand experience regardless of which items they receive.