When to Order Corporate Diwali Gifts: A Planning Timeline

Corporate Diwali gifting fails on scheduling far more often than on taste. The gift gets chosen well, then custom boxes need three weeks that nobody budgeted for, home addresses take a fortnight to collect, and couriers slow to a crawl in the final ten days. This is a timeline built backwards from the festival, plus an honest assessment of what remains possible when you start late.

Diwali follows the lunar calendar and shifts each year, so anchor this to the actual Lakshmi Puja date rather than to a fixed week. Our guide to the five days of Diwali sets out how the days fall.

Eight weeks out: decide the shape of it

This is the cheap stage, where decisions cost nothing and save a lot later.

Settle four things: your total budget and per-head figure; your headcount, broken into tiers if senior staff and clients are getting something different; whether you are shipping to offices or to home addresses; and who internally signs off. That last one delays more gifting programmes than any supplier ever has.

Then shortlist two or three suppliers and request samples. A sample takes time to make and send, and you want it in hand before committing, not after.

Six weeks out: confirm and lock

Samples are in. Choose the gift, confirm the exact contents, and lock the packaging decision — this is the fork that governs everything downstream.

Fully printed rigid boxes carry the longest lead time and a minimum quantity of their own. Printed sleeves or stickers on plain rigid boxes are considerably faster and, below a few hundred units, usually better value. If you want fully custom boxes, six weeks out is the last comfortable moment to commit.

If you are shipping to homes, start collecting addresses now. It will take longer than you think, you will need to chase, and the list will still be incomplete two weeks later.

Five weeks out: place the order

Confirm the final quantity, pay the advance, and get a written dispatch date. Ask specifically what happens if the quantity moves — headcounts change in October, and it is much easier to agree a tolerance now than to renegotiate later.

Get the GST invoice details agreed at this point too: supplier GSTIN, HSN codes, billing entity. Sorting paperwork now avoids a finance query landing in the week you are trying to distribute.

Three to four weeks out: production and proofs

Approve the printed proof for the card and packaging. Read it properly — a typo caught here is trivial and caught after printing is not.

Chase your address list to completion. Decide what happens for anyone who has not responded: a default office delivery is usually the sensible fallback.

If part of the order is fragile, ask how it will be packed and, if you can, see a packed sample. Transit damage is much cheaper to prevent than to replace at this point in the calendar.

Two weeks out: dispatch

Stock should be ready and going out now, not being made. Courier networks are already loading up, and the last ten days before the festival are the slowest of the year for delivery in India.

For office consolidation, confirm someone is present to receive at each location — a delivery that bounces because reception was closed can lose several days. For home delivery, expect a percentage of failed first attempts and make sure someone owns the follow-up.

The final week: distribution, not procurement

Anything not already dispatched is at real risk. Use this week for internal distribution, handing over, and sorting the handful of deliveries that went wrong.

Starting late? What is still possible

Four weeks out. Most things, if you drop fully custom boxes. Choose a ready item or a standard hamper, use plain rigid boxes with a printed sleeve or a card, and ship to offices rather than homes. Perfectly good outcome; just decide quickly.

Three weeks out. Ready stock only, standard packaging, printed card, office delivery. Skip anything hand-carved to order, and skip home addresses unless the list already exists.

Two weeks out. Ready stock, minimal packaging, office delivery, and accept that some of it lands close to the festival. Prioritise clients and senior staff if volumes have to be split across two waves.

Under two weeks. Consider gifting after the festival instead. A well-chosen gift arriving in the week after Diwali reads far better than a rushed one arriving late and damaged — and recipients notice the difference. Alternatively, hand over at an office gathering rather than shipping.

The one thing worth doing today

If Diwali is more than six weeks away, the single highest-value action is to fix your headcount, your per-head budget, and the office-versus-home decision. Almost every downstream problem in corporate gifting traces back to one of those three being unresolved while everything else moved ahead.

Gharana takes corporate and festival gifting from around 25 hampers upward, built with handcrafted brass, marble idols and puja essentials, with branded packaging, GST invoicing and pan-India dispatch. Our corporate gifting page covers options and how ordering works.

For choosing the gift itself, see the corporate Diwali gifting guide; for what each price band buys, the hamper budget breakdown.