Corporate joining kits, costed per head.

A joining kit — also called an onboarding kit, employee welcome kit or new-hire kit — is the set of branded items a company hands a new employee on or before day one. At minimum it carries the company logo on something the person will keep using: a notebook, a pen, a bottle, an ID card holder. At the upper end it is a boxed presentation with apparel, a diary, drinkware and desk accessories.

The purpose is narrower than "a gift". A joining kit does three practical jobs. It removes the awkward first hour where a new hire has nothing on their desk. It gets your brand into their daily habits — and, with a bottle or a t-shirt, out of the building and in front of other people. And it signals to the joiner that their arrival was planned rather than improvised, which is the part HR teams tell us actually shows up in how the first week goes.

Practically, a joining kit is also the most repeatable order a company places. A team hiring twenty people a month needs the same kit every month, with the same logo, in the same colours. That is the reason we treat it differently from festive or event gifting: the artwork gets approved once and the configuration stays on file, so a reorder is a quantity and a date rather than a fresh project.

If you are still deciding what to put in the kit, start with the employee joining kit checklist — it walks item-by-item through the four layers of a good kit. If you already know the contents and want pre-configured tiers you can quote directly, go to employee welcome kits. This page is the middle step: the money and the mechanics.

The tension in joining kits is structural: bulk pricing rewards volume, but hiring arrives in ones and twos. Most companies resolve it badly in one of two directions — either over-ordering 300 kits and storing them until the design is out of date, or ordering ten at a time and paying setup costs repeatedly.

The middle path is to separate the production run from the handover. Order one quarter's expected intake in a single production batch, take delivery of all of it, and hand out kits as people join. You pay the better per-unit rate once, the branding setup once, and you still have kits available the week someone starts. Our MOQ of 10 pieces per item means the floor is low enough that even a small team can do this with a quarter's worth rather than a year's.

Two things make this work rather than just moving the problem. First, keep the kit contents generic — company logo, not individual names — so any kit fits any joiner; personalised items go in a separate small run when you know who is coming. Second, avoid apparel in the stored batch unless you are confident in the size mix, since shirts are the one item where storing the wrong distribution wastes the saving you just made.

If your hiring is genuinely continuous, tell us the monthly run rate and we will quote a standing order — same configuration, fixed quantity, dispatched on a set date each month. That is the cleanest version of this, because nobody has to remember to place it.

Work back from the date the new hire walks in. Production is 7–10 business days from artwork approval for a branded bulk kit — every item is branded separately, then assembled and packed, and that sequence does not compress much. Add two to three days for the quote-and-mockup round trip, plus however long your own approval or PO cycle takes.

So a kit for a batch joining on the 1st of a month should be briefed in the middle of the previous month. If you hire continuously, the cleaner pattern is a standing order: one batch every month or quarter at a fixed quantity, dispatched on a set date, so you are never planning it again.

We will not tell you a branded bulk kit ships same-day, because it does not. What we will do is confirm a firm dispatch date in the quote, so you can commit to your joining date with something real behind it.