CASE STUDY: our client gifting strategy (gin)

If you give gifts to clients (for Christmas, or any reason), this one's for you. It's about how Rise at Seven's gifting strategy came together (and why it worked).

On my first day “client side” at Pendragon PLC I had to sign a bunch of documents.

I’ve seen those documents in agencies before (because I’ve worked for agencies owned by PLCs before) but, had it been possible in the years before 2018, the agency versions those documents would have been written by ChatGPT and largely ignored. We needed a policy for this or that because clients asked to see it sometimes, not because there was any real chance it would be used.

Clients tend to take this seriously though: not everyone there is a well-paid* marketer; they have supply chains to consider; a scandal can damage a share price, and so on.

So, my first day client side, I read through an anti-bribery policy that real lawyers had written.

Some interesting rules around hospitality…and I received anything worth more than £25, I’d have to declare it and would probably have to give it up.

There was an exception though: branded merchandise.

It didn’t matter how much the thing I received might cost, as long as it was judged to be branded merchandise.

Suddenly it made sense why Google was giving its corporate clients Google-branded drinks fridges.

Parkdean Resorts’ onboarding meeting

Fast forward a little and a six month old Rise at Seven’s team was heading up to Newcastle for our first meeting at the offices of one of my favourite ever clients, Parkdean Resorts.

We’d done the initial pitch in a Holiday Inn down the road because they couldn’t get a meeting room; stage two was at our office (which was actually Über Agency’s office, we just rented some desks pre-lockdown); it was early December and this was the first onboarding meeting.

(One of many examples that Parkdean is a favourite client, by the way: they wanted us to start in January and paid us a month early to make sure the handover from the incumbent was smooth - this holiday company had big plans for 2020 - a year which, as I recall, was just smooth sailing all round, really.)

Two vivid images from that day will be in my brain forever: as we were leaving, the car park was full, and although some of us took the train, Ellie Wray drove and got her car stuck in the mud on one of the grass verges…I will always remember watching her wheels spinning as the Rise team and some of the Parkdean marketing team tried to push her out…

…and I remember walking through the revolving doors into the Parkdean offices for the first time to see, straight in front of us, Christmas hampers stacked to the ceiling.

There were some other boxes too, maybe 50 gifts in total, but at least 20 huge hampers from Fortnums and the like were taking up a lot of the space.

When we asked why, the Parkdean team told us they weren’t allowed to accept the gifts because of the bribery policy and that they would be raffled off.

I wondered if the suppliers who sent the gifts knew that they probably wouldn't end up with their contacts.

Gin

The first Rise at Seven gin collab was actually for our first birthday in June 2020, not Christmas (though we did do our own gins and rums for the Christmases that followed).

We wanted to give a gift to everyone we felt had shown belief in us: mostly clients; some people who had sent us referrals; some who had just said nice things about us in public.

We wanted it to be something that people would photograph and post on social media…and, crucially, something they wouldn’t have to give up to make their lawyers happy…so it would need to be branded.

One of our team, Amber, had previously worked at True North, who made Sheffield Dry Gin, which we decided was perfect.

True North would allow us to replace the labels on Sheffield Dry Gin with Rise at Seven labels, which we designed ourselves, ticking the branded merchandise box…and Sheffield Dry Gin is very good gin, so we thought a lot of people would be pleased to receive it. It was very of-Sheffield, which was a nice opportunity to shout about our hometown…plus gin was particularly popular at the time, which we felt showed we were on-trend (I guess if we were looking for a similarly trendy gift in 2026 it would be cocaine). We bought 100 bottles and Amber organised delivery of each.

I’ll leave you with some things we learned:

• A bottle of gin or similar, when bought in bulk, is so much cheaper than a hamper that we could give one to every client contact we worked with, not just the “key POC”. We want everyone on side because it makes our job easier now and might fill our pipeline if they move in future (plus, often some of the brand’s team don’t have a say in who they work with, so it’s nice to show them that we value the relationship nonetheless)
• Sending the gin to anyone who sent us a referral proved to encourage more referrals, to the point where half the clients we won on our journey to £12m in 3 years were referrals or previous relationships
• Sending the gin to people who said nice things about us encouraged more people to say nice things about us
• Although lots of the Rise at Seven team were constantly active on social media (I spoke to Bethan Vincent about this on her podcast at the time), we used set pieces (like new product launches; or new hires; or marketing initiatives) to flood social media feeds for a day at a time. 50+ people each posted about the thing and amplified each other, to the point where it wasn’t possible to open a social platform and miss the thing we had done. We generally tagged our staff in a lot of things (asking people to follow our new hires, for example) so that many people might be connected to, or follow, a lot of our team (in some cases, all 100+ of us) and generally saw multiple versions of the update. We were right that lots of people would share pictures of the gin (perhaps wanting to inspire a bit of FOMO that they were one of the few recipients)...and our team, though only 20 of us on that first birthday, retweeted and commented on every single one of them. “Flooding the feed” is even more important in 2026, where LinkedIn makes it much easier to miss a post.