After nearly a two-years slump, India Inc is leveraging on the festival fervour to shrug off the pandemic blues and engage with stakeholders and employees.

There is a strong surge in corporate gifting orders coupled with splurging on never-seen-before items ranging from donation cards to enable people to contribute to a cause of their choice to custom-made healthy snacks. Sustainability and philanthropy-themed gifting trends are also witnessing an uptick.

Tarun Joshi, Founder and CEO, Join Ventures, which owns IGP.com, said it is seeing strong pent-up demand and growth rate of nearly 400 per cent this Diwali compared to last year.

“This growth for us is largely being driven by technology companies, new age companies and start-ups as they want to use this festival season to re-connect with their stakeholders, customers and employees. We are also seeing about a 20 per cent increase in company budgets, since due to the pandemic, this is the first key occasion for companies to focus on gifting in nearly a year,” he added.

Aspirational gifting

Joshi said there is a strong focus on aspirational gifting. From healthy snacks and trail mixes to chocolate truffles and chocolate-coated dates and from wearables to hand-made scented candles, gift hampers are loaded with a larger set of assortments. Donatekart, a online crowd-funding platform, offers donation gift cards to enable people to contribute to a cause of their choice.

Contributing to causes

Anil Kumar Reddy, CEO & Founder, Donatekart, said, “Due to the increase in virtual employee engagements, we saw significant growth in Donatekart’s corporate engagement model. The Donatekart Gift Card has redefined gifting for some of the large corporates this Diwali such as HDFC Bank, CGI Inc., DCM Shriram, etc, as it is more meaningful to give someone the power to create an impact. We see a majority of employees considering this as a fantastic way of gifting and contributing to causes they really care about.”

Players such as Ferns N Petals are expecting corporate gifting business to grow over the pre-pandemic levels. Manish Saini, COO, E-commerce, Ferns N Petals, said the company expects to clock a 116 per cent growth in 2021 in the corporate gifting business compared to 2019. The corporate gifting segment contributed only about 1 per cent to the company's overall business in 2019 but it expects this to increase to about 4 per cent in 2021.

Edible, dry fruits, branded chocolates, utility items such as electronics, remain all-time favourites.

“Edible products like sweets, namkeen and dry fruits remain a favourite when it comes to corporate gifting. We have been receiving bulk orders from numerous corporates and our team works closely with them to provide customised corporate gifts." said Dawinder Pal, Head of Marketing at Bikano.