We’ve all heard of the five love languages. Physical touch, words of affirmation, acts of service, quality time, and gift giving. Gift giving often gets a bad {wrap}. (See what we did there?) Some people classify this love language as materialistic. 

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But at the root of gifting is expressing your love and affection to someone through a physical item. For example: You saw a keychain that perfectly encapsulates your significant other’s personality when you know they’ve been looking for a keychain and desperately need one. What do you do? Immediately buy it.

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As co-founders here at Accént, we all operate the same way. We fell in love with gifting from a very young age. It brought us genuine joy to see our loved ones’ eyes light up as they tore through the wrapping paper and pried open their present. They aww’d and smiled so big seeing the care and thought of such a personalized gift. Something so tailored to them, it was kismet. 

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We also shared another common experience. Receiving terrible gifts. 

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With a team of Pakistani, Muslim, first-generation, oldest daughters, there was bound to be some way we received gifts we didn’t like. And it usually stemmed from Corporate America. Our employers loved giving us Muslim girls that don’t drink wine and other alcoholic beverages. It seemed like the more we declined happy hour invitations, the more bottles we received as gifts in the mail. And that really shone a light to us on just how bad that feeling of receiving a terrible gift was. It made us feel unwanted and unseen. It made us feel uncared for and overlooked. It especially hurt our gift-giving hearts. It’s truly not hard to gift a person something they actually want, need, and will love. It just didn’t make sense to us why corporate gifting was any different. 

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So we decided to do something about it. 

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We paired our mutual love for gifting with our terrible corporate gifting experiences and created Accént! Accént is all about gifting better. And that could mean a number of things, so let’s walk through our specialities. 

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1. Inclusive Gifting: From our experiences as BIPOC women, we wanted to ensure no one ever felt like their employer didn’t care about them. We want to bring more awareness of celebrating holidays outside of the standard Christmas holiday season. Employees come from all walks of life and should not be boxed into the “mainstream” holiday season. People celebrate Eid, Diwali, and Hanukkah. People celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, Black History Month, and AAPI Month. People celebrate so many moments and holidays that aren’t recognized in the workplace and it’s such a missed opportunity as a company. Every company should be dedicated towards making their employees feel represented and there’s no better way of doing that than through gifting. To make this a reality, we’ve paired up other 200 small minority-owned vendors to create a network of unique and representative gifts. We’re constantly on a mission to find just the right gifts to celebrate everything under the sun while also supporting the community directly. 

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2. Functional Gifts: The worst gifts are those that sit on a shelf and accumulate dust for years to come. Maybe you use that half sleeve, company logo black t-shirt to dry your hair one day. Maybe you’ll pull out that branded ballpoint pen from the depths of your drawer when you really can’t find any of the other 100 pens you own. But mostly, they’ll sit there. And it’s an absolute waste! Why are companies spending so much money on generic gifts that will never see the light of day? And for the people receiving, it’s just another problem of clutter you have to worry about. For the sake of everyone involved, let’s find more functional gifts that are worth it and will be used. 

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3. Trendy Gifts: On that same vein, you definitely aren’t wearing those company shirts that have a simple logo on them or those koozies that look straight out of 2015. We want trendy and aesthetic gifts. In the age of social media, that wow factor is gold. It’s the currency of the digital world. You never want to see someone else decked out in the cutest matching and branded sweatsuit and think, “Wow! Why didn’t MY company gift me THAT.” At Accént, it’s our full-time jobs to scour the Internet day and night to find the top, trendy gifts that can be perfectly tailored for your company. After all, gifting is what we do best! 

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So that’s us! We hope you feel inspired to either demand better gifts or send better gifts! It’s what we all deserve. Ready to make the next step? Click here to chat with our gifting experts. Let’s get to gifting!