Every year we try to give our best friends and clients a gift here at Systemato. A gift that is not just the usual kind of high-end leather-bound polished steel object that people will put on their desk and quickly forget about, or worse never even use. So for years now we’ve tried to be original and give our friends and clients fun and useful presents.
4PLAY
For example, in 2017, we made a game. This was a completely in-house designed game by a very good friend of mine. He basically came up with the rules, made our own tweaks to it followed by a redesign. What was interesting about this was that it was an entirely 3D printed game.
Every single piece was essentially unique, meaning that it was very much a team project involving Diane and I kneeling down in my friend’s garage cutting lengths of pipe to make the containers for this game, storing each individual piece in different, so on and so forth.What was so fantastic about the 2017 corporate gift is that I’m still reminded of this by many people to this very day, telling me that it is a very competitive game that often starts family arguments at Christmas time.
Water bottle
In 2018, we went a little bit differently. This time around we commissioned high quality borosilicate glass bottles to remind people (especially people who like us are desk-bound) of the importance of drinking regularly.
Whatever it is you’re drinking, Pepsi or water, a glass bottle makes it possible for anyone to fill it up every day before work or and drink from it regularly.
These were super high quality bottles provided by a Danish company; the winning factor to our decision was the fact that we could pick the best most fitting kind of cap in our colour of choice, as well as had the Systemato logo very very subtly engraved on the neck of the bottle.
systematoil
Last year we also went for a bottle, but this time around we filled the bottle!
Once again, a glass bottle, for sustainability reasons because we wanted to make sure that whatever we fill it up with, the moment it finishes, you can reuse this bottle.
This time round, we distributed around 85 liters of super virgin olive oil from the family estate of a very good friend of mine in Calabria in Italy.
All our clients, especially the ones in the catering business, really liked the oil. Let’s face it, everyone really in this Mediterranean country loves a fantastic quality bottle of unfiltered olive oil.
systemabru
Moving on to this year, the Year of the Pandemic…we went with, you guessed it – glass bottles! Except this time around we’re keeping it local, down the road kind of local as Antoine, one of our writers has a microbrewery with his partner called Maramaw Brewer and they came up with an IPA called Cloud Lola so we requested them to make our own batch of beer.
So essentially, Systemato has their own custom brew. We’ve roughly got around 120 bottles to be distributed to the people that we’ve worked with for many years or just started doing business with.
Besides the ingredients included in the recipe for our beer, everything else was done by us. Diane designed the labels and decided to go with a retro-arcade game feel to it, and we also wrote every single word by hand on the tags. We were also the ones to apply the stickers to the bottles and our personal favourite final part of the process, deliver them as well.
The sense of gratitude we get whenever we get to meet our clients, even briefly, and now from a distance is always something we look forward to. And this year, their Christmas present is beer because well, it’s been that kind of a year and we are ready to fight anyone if they dare tell us that we can’t have a beer and enjoy it.
Looking back on our corporate gifts over the years, it’s fair to say that we’re quite proud of what we’ve come up with and am excited to see what we’re going to do next year.
If you have good ideas, send them on to us, whether you or a loved one makes or supplies something beautiful, artisan and sustainable. As you can tell from reading this, we like to give items that have an aesthetic value as well as a production value.
So if that sounds like something you can provide, we’d love to hear from you or your ideas, perhaps over the next few months we can commission something for next year.
