Midsummer, the longest day of the year

The date is the hard part

The hard part of a Midsummer gift is not choosing the product, it is the date. By the middle of June the office starts to empty and approvals slow down, so anything ordered late arrives in July when there is nobody there to receive it. Midsummer is a timing job before it is a product job.

The longest day of the year

Midsummer Eve falls on the Friday between 19 and 25 June and Midsummer Day on the Saturday after it, and the sun barely sets. People leave the city, the maypole gets dressed with birch and flowers, and the evening ends with dancing on a meadow. For a lot of Swedes the holiday weighs more than New Year's Eve.

For a company it is the marker for the start of summer: the last time the team is in one place before the holidays. That is also what makes it awkward, because the week that feels natural for a gift is the week half the people you need a decision from are already at a summer house.

Out in nature

Midsummer is spent outdoors, at a summer house, by a lake, in a park or in someone's garden. Merchandise for it works when it is the sort of thing a person would have packed anyway. A water bottle goes to the picnic and comes home again, a cooler bag keeps the drinks cold on the warmest day of the year, and a cap or a hat is shade at nine in the evening when the sun is still up.

Choosing wrong here is cheap to do and expensive to look at. We have talked clients out of glassware for this occasion more than once, because it looks right in the proposal and does not survive a car boot.

Summer clothing

Midsummer is the point in the year when people change what they wear. A t-shirt, a polo or a pair of shorts with a small mark on the chest gets worn from June to September, and few categories line up this closely: the season the gift was made for starts the week it is handed over. Sunglasses are the unexpected choice, and the most used one.

Placement decides whether the garment gets worn off the clock, because a small mark on the left chest reads differently from a full front print.

The part nobody enjoys is sizes. Ordering by headcount instead of by a size curve is how you end up with forty shirts and eleven people who cannot wear one, so we ask for the curve before we quote. It is a slower conversation and a shorter list of complaints in August.

A set to hand over before the holiday

Midsummer usually coincides with the start of summer leave, so a small set given that week reads as a send-off rather than a campaign. A cloth bag or a backpack works as the packaging, with a bottle, a cap and something from the sweets collection inside.

Kitting is nobody's favourite part of the job: it is people at a table in our Stockholm warehouse, putting the same four items in the same order into a hundred bags. We would rather do that than send four parcels to one office and leave the work there.

Ordering before June

Stock products with standard decoration are the short route, and custom development is not: samples, corrections, approval, production. Ask in the first half of May and the choice is still open, ask in the second week of June and the choice is whatever is on the shelf.

Some years we say no, because a June order for a custom product that has never been sampled is not a rush job, it is a promise we cannot keep. When the stock sits with us, the June order is a pick and pack instead of a production run.

Four things that fit the occasion

The sections above are about the day itself. These four items are the ones that end up in the set most often, chosen for the part of the year when the picnic is over and the thing is still in use.

• Stedman Classic-T Women: a plain cotton t-shirt in a women's cut, and the item that exposes a missing size curve faster than anything else in the box.
• Camo Snapback Trucker: a mesh-back cap with an adjustable closure, so it is the one garment in the set that needs no size count at all.
• Stainless Steel Bottle Herilox 630ml: 630 ml of stainless steel that keeps water cold through the afternoon and comes home from the meadow instead of into a bin.
• Worcester Keyring Bottle Opener: the cheapest item here and the one that gets used first, because nobody packing for a picnic remembers an opener.

Midsummer is a simple reason to make a working day better and get the team around one table. Add things that are still in use after June and the impression does not end with the weekend.

Bottles that come back from the picnic. Sizes counted before they are ordered. A bag packed by hand in Stockholm. A print still on the shirt next June. That is our corner of the business. And the question underneath it: whether the gift arrives while the summer it was made for is still ahead of the person opening it.