Give a goodie, build your brand

Receiving an online order is not the most romantic moment you can have. This is why many brands try to give a personal touch by adding ‘a goodie’, especially now with Christmas coming up. Shame most of those goodies are nonsense stuff that has nothing to do with the brand you’ve just ordered and seem to be leftovers from a container arriving from China!

It doesn’t need to be that way. With a bit of creativity online retailers can create giveaways that are truly on brand and can work as long term ‘service signature’. A great example of this is Yumeko, a Dutch brand of organic & fair trade bed linen and home accessories that I blogged about earlier here.

With every order you get a small bag of fragrant lavender to refresh your linen cupboard. This totally ‘on brand’ goodie fits with their vision of softness and peaceful sleep, is high quality and unexpected. Cleverly, it enhances the brand experience of using the bed linen.

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Nice, but that’s not all. This ‘’service signature’ has a story of its own

The lavender bags are made with leftovers from their organic cotton sheets and are filled with each with 12gr of organic French lavender. This job is done by Sophie, Fred, Ellie and other Yumeko ‘colleagues’ who are part of a local Dutch disabled Association that Yumeko works with. So a social purpose is baked into the customer experience. Yumeko made beautiful portraits and interviews or those ‘colleagues’ and shared it online on their blog here.


In conclusion, the key tips from the Yumeko story to sleep on if you’re gonna make goodies:

1. make them on-brand

2. execute with excellence. No cheap crap please!

If your goodies are on vision AND well executed AND executed consistently over time they can become a distinctive brand property that customers will actually look forward to in their next order, and the one after that.