Birthday Islander Gift Hamper

Create a collection of Birthday Hampers which can be highly personalised and customised to individual personalities. A desire to move away from lazy gender segmentation gender bias to avoiding stereotyping but still maintain a strong connection with the principal ideas justifiying the customisation meets in this section. All designs would be are personable yet there would be a generalised carousel of products to select from. Such general products would be over-ridable on the basis of individual human preferences. Whilst the dominant focus was on Imagination, Quality and Value, these Birthday Hampers needed reassuringly familiar contents synonymous with Birthday Hampers, yet they needed to steer away from the types of products normally associated with conventional food hampers.

Hampers Galore would probably have been a more sensible name for the company if what our original mission had been to sell as many hampers as possible. However our mission was to create the greatest gifts in the world for your friends and family back home. It has been this focus on the sentiment and purity of spirit, which has enabled us to stay in love with our business and staying in love requires a lot of work. Delivering Magical Birthday Hampers is a complex and difficult task, but fundamentally vital are obvious and simple considerations.

How could we design Birthday Hampers, which were what shoppers considered to be a hamper, but still stand out as being different. How could we appeal to the customer’s desire for something personal as a gift, but at the same time ensure that the customer was getting the service that they wanted. We needed Birthday Hampers with ideas, not Birthday Hampers, which were ideas. This range needed to retain a core structure of Birthday products, which were continuously in demand and which could be tailored to suit a myriad selection of personalisation. Most importantly the Personal Birthday Hampers had to be able to be assembled quickly, shipped immediately and delivered with alacrity by air-freight anywhere in Europe. The proposition we wanted to make to our customers was not to buy a Birthday Hamper from Basketsgalore, which required an unnecessary degree of personalisation, but could still be personalised in a timely fashion. After all each hamper is already personalised by the sender’s gift card message. The company’s also authorises the assembly team to gently amend our contents and presentation to match the message/occasion of the hamper. None of this causes delay which is critical because the vast majority of shoppers want immediate dispatch.

Many products were considered, many applications were dreamed up, but very few products ticked every required box for inclusion with a Birthday Hamper in the modern age of the 2020s and could be future proofed. We are in a highly unusual place in that whilst our product is digital to our customers, it is tangible to the recipient. Timing & Coordination are critical elements in the success of our products and business. We needed something Personalisable, which was Timeless and could be integrated easily within the mainframe design of the branded Birthday Hamper Experience we wished to offer.

We wanted these Birthday Hampers to be personal, to capture personality and to be personable. We didn’t want these worthy aims to be compromised over time with a lack of definition. Losing that definition or focus would lead to disappointed so we had to be ruthless in terms of implementation. Starting with the ingredients for our Personal Birthday Hampers, we analysed data across a number of 6 year control periods from university start-up days to modern times. What did people want personalised? Was it the container, the card, the products? To what degree was personalisation possible and what would be the operational obstacles created that would be necessary to pre-empt.

We wanted these Birthday Hampers to have a unique personal feel to them, with particular emphasis on the recipient. An important distinction to make as so many hampers nowadays are based on old corporate designs intended to evoke a sense of quality rather than be intended to please the desires of the Birthday recipient. We co-ordinated colour and defined the Birthday message through product selection and then we went one step further. We colour coordinated a set number of gently varying designs so that product wishes of our customers were enshrined, then we attached the symbolism of Happy Birthday Candle and reading material. To make things even better, the drop down personalisation options would act as idea generators for our digital shoppers.

We had to jettison the traditional wicker lidded basket container. They are simply not sustainable for Europe going forward. Rattan doesn’t grow here in commercial quantities. Feedback from shoppers clearly demonstrated that there was no longer an association of premiumness with wicker that they were prepared to pay for, so long as what was on offer was of high quality. We thought outside, inside and around the box. We craved something striking, something practical and we wanted our recipients to have the option of extending the life of the container because of its utility value. We commissioned our own in-house task force drawing upon our experience as designers. We designed a box perfect for a our Hamper designation, ideally applicable to being a Birthday Hamper and customisable to a range of other gift occasions when you may consider a hamper.

Reaching out to wider International appeal focused on delivering our personalised Hampers for Birthdays was essential. This level of product development and investment in terms of our time and resources could not be justified on a local, regional or even a national bias. The personalising range of our Birthday Hampers is conduicive to a world without borders, where reading, knowledge and information are particularly tasty cookies. We wanted personal Birthday Hampers by interest or activity, not by the often mistaken assumptions or compromised idealism of product designers when it came to flavours and tastes selected for Birthday Hampers.