Personalised Gifts – How to Give Them a Personal Touch

Are you looking for ideas for personalised gifts? Maybe you’ve been invited to a birthday or wedding and want to give your gift a personal touch? You don’t have to be a drawing god or a craft queen. With these tips you can make your gift special in just 15 minutes.

1. Create a Special Card

Nowadays, writing letters is out and you send your birthday greeting via Whatsapp or Facebook. This takes less time and is much more convenient than picking up a pen. That’s exactly why personalised cards are really something special as an addition to personalised gifts. For special occasions such as anniversaries, weddings, engagement parties, christenings or the party for a driving licence, it is a good idea to design the card motif and the text to match the occasion.

Here* you can find inexpensive craft materials for your card. The great challenge of creating the ideal card for personalised gifts is to give common motifs and congratulations an individual touch. Here are our 3 best tips on how to create a unique original card in just 15 minutes:.

Calligraphy:

You have a great saying ready? Perfect! Put it on the cover of your card and draw the letters artfully with black ink and a calligraphy pen. If you are writing with a calligraphy pen for the first time, I advise you to buy the Beginner’s Set by Cretacolor*. The fountain pen lies well in the hand, is neither too light nor too heavy and you have three fountain pen attachments and different ink colours to choose from. 

Chinese Characters and Symbols

Significant and easy to implement for personalised gifts are symbols or Chinese characters that match the occasion, such as luck or love. If you are skilled in writing with a brush, you can write with Chinese ink, but I usually just use regular black ink. Here is a list of Chinese characters and their German meaning.

Lucky Coins and Clovers

1 cent coins and four-leaf clovers stand for luck – and that’s a message that basically fits all special occasions. If you have enough coins, you can use them to create simple symbols and stick them on a blank card, for example two intertwined rings as a wedding symbol. If you stick a four-leaf clover on a card, you can fill the inside of each leaf with a saying.

2. Packaging Makes Personalised Gifts Exceptional

For young children, there is nothing more awesome than unwrapping presents. I admit it: there’s still a little kid in me and I find wrapping can be almost as much fun as unwrapping. There are countless ways you can wrap personalised gifts originally. You don’t necessarily need wrapping paper. Especially when a gift is wrapped in cardboard, newspaper or a towel, the guesswork starts as to what is hidden inside.

Surprise Bomb

To really surprise the recipient, the most important thing is to change the appearance of the gift. The easiest way to do this is to wrap your gift in layers of newspaper countless times until it’s impossible to guess what’s inside. For personalised gifts, I like to write a saying or comment on each layer of newspaper, so laughter is inevitable when you unwrap it..

The UFO

At weddings or larger birthday celebrations, people often don’t hand over their gift personally, but place it on a gift table. Especially “normal” gifts such as a box of chocolates or cinema vouchers can be made eye-catching by using alien packaging. Simply take a bowl (diameter approx. 14 cm) and line it with several layers of aluminium foil, leaving approx. 1 cm overhanging the edges of the bowl. Line the inside around your gift with newspaper so that your dome keeps its nice shape. Now place a flat dinner plate (diameter approx. 30-40 cm) on a cardboard box and surround it with a pencil.

Cut out the circle. Cover the top of the plate with 3 layers of aluminium foil and press them on to take on the curve of the plate. Now fill the space between the aluminium imprint of the plate and the cardboard circle with newspaper and cover both with a layer of aluminium foil. Then you only need to stick the dome, in which you will hide the personalised gift as a galactic passenger, onto the aluminium disc and the UFO is ready.

Tip: I put some rubber aliens on my UFO as decoration, which went down very well. 

Eye-Catching Packaging for Personalised Gifts

If you’ve pimped your gift with a beautiful card, origami birds or customised labels, you’ll want to show it off to its best advantage. The best thing to do is to take a square or rectangular sturdy cardboard box and wrap it in wrapping paper. Arrange your gift on it and, if necessary, fix it to the cardboard with adhesive tape or all-purpose glue. Now take the cellophane foil and staple it together at the corners.

3. Special Personal Messages

You are looking for ideas for personalised gifts that convey a message or perfectly match your gift to a certain life situation? Then you should consider which item is particularly suitable for this when buying. You can make any gift original and unique with a little imagination and creativity – here we have limited ourselves to tips that quickly and easily convey personal messages for personalised gifts..

Labels and Recipes:

You can personalise bottles, food, DVDs, BluRays and books beautifully with a customised label. There is a good selection of different coloured self-adhesive labels that are quick and easy to make. Think of a funny slogan and stick it over the actual label. This way, instead of an expensive wine, you can give an original “elixir of love” for a wedding or a basket full of mysterious ingredients for baking “happiness cake” or “friendship soup” for a birthday. For such personalised gifts, the basket full of ingredients naturally also includes the matching recipe!

Origami:

According to a Japanese legend, anyone who folds 1000 origami cranes will get a wish granted. Since this cannot be done in 15 minutes, it is enough for us to fold 1-3 cranes and inscribe them with an individual message or good wishes. 🙂

For this you need square thin origami paper and skilled fingers. This is how you fold the Japanese birds:.

Flowers and Bouquets:

Women love flowers and yet they rarely get them or give them as gifts. There is no woman, no matter what age, who does not enjoy a flower or a bouquet. Every flower has a meaning and can become a subtle vessel for your message. For example, white carnations stand for fidelity, orchids and peonies for wealth and red roses for harmony. Here you can find a list with the symbolism of the most common flowers – but funnily enough, the “professionals” often contradict each other. You can find completely different meanings for the same flower.

With a dedication or a saying that matches the flowers and their meaning, you can brand your bouquet individually and have the personalised gift delivered to the recipient’s home on the desired date!

Tip: Some women’s first names are named after flowers! You can ask Google whether a particular flower goes especially well with the recipient’s name and make your bouquet especially original and personal. For example, roses go with Rosalie, Rosa or Rosalia and lilies with Lilly, Lillian, Lilja or heather with Erika, Heather and Heide.

4. Personalise Vouchers

You can buy vouchers in any shop. Most of the time they are quite unimpressive plastic cards that don’t look like much. With these tips you can pimp up any voucher:.

Making Gift Cards Personal

You must have thought of something when you bought the gift voucher in the shop and it fits a hobby or fulfils a special wish. Print out a thematically appropriate photo in DIN A4 (vending machines for this are available in every drugstore or Saturn or Mediamarkt), put the voucher card in a small coloured envelope and stick it on the photo. Depending on your preference, you can frame the picture or simply attach it to a cardboard box covered with wrapping paper in a contrasting colour using photo stickers .

Upcycling Packaging

Empty Ferrero Rocher packaging, praline boxes, cheese packaging made of pressboard or yoghurt pots are perfect for giving them a second life as original packaging. Simply decorate the packaging of your choice with wrapping paper or opaque colours (for example acrylic paints, different coloured Edding or silver and gold lacquer pens) and/or paint them. Then fill the inside of the ecological treasure chest with a few coins, wrap the voucher in gold foil and drape it on its cushion of coins. Now wrap the cup or box with a bow et voilà: The ecological upcycling packaging is ready..

Take a look at our other tips for gifts for friends. In general, there are all kinds of ideas for activities to discover with friends, couples or children on our leisure ideas portal.

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