Around 70 per cent of our corporate hamper orders land at Christmas, so we spend every autumn watching the same pattern repeat: the organised companies order in October and get exactly what they planned, and the rest discover in mid-December that hampers, couriers and calendars all have limits. Here is the timeline as we see it from the dispatch side, written to be useful rather than alarming.
When do companies start planning corporate gifts?
The serious planning starts in September and October. That is when budgets get signed off, recipient lists get pulled together and suppliers get shortlisted, and it is visible in our order book: corporate enquiries climb steadily from early autumn, well before a single hamper needs to leave the building.
That timing is rational rather than keen. The early planners get first pick of the range before popular hampers sell through, time to arrange a corporate account and invoicing, and a calm window to collect delivery addresses, which is slower than anyone expects when home delivery is involved. If branding or a bespoke hamper is in the plan, autumn is when those conversations have to happen. None of this can be compressed into the second week of December.
When should I order for Christmas?
October, and here is the part that surprises people: ordering early does not mean your hampers arrive early.
When you order from us, you choose a dispatch date at checkout, in the calendar, per destination. That is the date your hamper leaves us, not a guaranteed delivery day: in the December rush no courier will promise an exact delivery date, so think of it as scheduling when the gift goes out. An order placed on the 10th of October to dispatch on the 16th of December is held by our system and released at the right moment, automatically. The order sits safely scheduled while everyone else’s December panic happens around it.
So the honest answer is: order as soon as your list is final, attach the December dispatch dates you want, and you are done. The hampers are reserved, the dispatch dates are set, and your only remaining job is to enjoy being the person whose gifts went out without a December scramble.
How far in advance should I order corporate hampers?
It depends on what kind of order it is, so here are the bands we work to:
A standard order to a handful of Irish addresses needs the least runway. Outside the December peak, days; inside it, order by late November to keep the full choice of dispatch dates.
A multi-address order to dozens or hundreds of recipients needs your address list more than it needs anything else. The ordering itself is quick through the spreadsheet route, but collecting and checking that many addresses reliably takes two or three weeks, so start the list in early November even if the order goes in later.
International orders need the most. Hampers to Britain cross a customs border, and anything containing alcohol can only travel there during a seasonal window that closes shortly before Christmas; the USA is harder still, and not a route we can promise for time-sensitive gifts. Treat the end of November as your deadline for overseas recipients and read sending corporate gifts abroad from Ireland before building the list.
Branded or bespoke hampers sit outside all these bands and want an autumn conversation, for reasons covered in our piece on branding.
What is the last date for Christmas hamper delivery in Ireland?
The truthful answer is that it moves every year, because it depends on courier cutoffs that are published each autumn, on which day of the week Christmas falls, and on how the final week’s volumes behave. Any page quoting you a fixed last date in June is guessing. We publish our own final order dates each season once the carriers confirm theirs, and we hold to them.
But the more useful answer is that the last possible date is the wrong target. For corporate gifts, aim to dispatch everything in good time to arrive in the first two weeks of December. Offices begin emptying from the middle of the month; a hamper that arrives on the 23rd of December to a closed reception is a hamper nobody enjoys, and with perishable contents it is worse than late, it is wasted. Early December delivery means the recipient is actually there, the salmon and cheese have their full keeping time ahead of the festivities, and any rare hiccup still has room to be fixed before the day itself.
The pattern to copy is dull and effective: list finalised in October, order placed with dispatch dates attached, everything going out in good time to land between the 1st and the 12th of December. The pattern to avoid arrives in our inbox every year around the 18th of December, written entirely in exclamation marks.
One closing reassurance for the planners reading this in summer: this page stays current. The figures above are how the season works structurally, not one year’s courier dates, and we update our published cutoffs annually once they are confirmed.
