Hampers UK or Gift Baskets UK

When we started Basketsgalore, it started off as an alternative to flowers and hampers.
We travelled around our local area, which has a catchment area of half a million people. We designed our own flyers and our own brochure and then printed quantities of 1000-2000. It was always advertised as a gift alternative to sending flowers and hampers.

We visited industrial parks and visited every business in the area, we stood at train stations and handed out flyers at Mothers Day, Valentines Day, etc. We posted our 16 page colour brochure to marketing executives in major corporations. We did competitions in local papers and all the time we marketed it as an alternative to the traditional hamper.

We had truthfully never heard of the term gift basket, but our baskets were gift baskets. If you look at the wayback machine on Google, you can see what some of our early baskets were called; Cleopatra’s Bath, Sleepless in London, Appartment dweller (which caused us a lot of consternation when we failed to spot the typo before going to print). There was Ducky’s Delight, A Taste of the Exotic, Spoil Me Silly, Who’s a Clever little Monkey, Gardeners Delight.

The fact was that none of our baskets contained foods, there was a predominance of soaps, craft items and some chocolates. My favourite item was a hand painted light bulb made by my mother in the Apartment Dweller Basket.

When we were out trying to sell, an IT expert was interested in what we were selling and suggested we took the company online. He helped us generate traffic and all he wanted was for the company to make Charitable donations to Sight-Savers in return for his work. Since then our paths have parted and he now generates traffic for other companies. However, we still contribute every month to Sightsavers as a thank you to his help in the early days.

We were the only company online selling gifts in a basket and people were buying our service and creations. Over the years we have simply branched out, extending the breadth of the service to include food.

So what has happened is that a British Basket company ended up competing with hamper companies in the UK. However, it is nice to have a differentiation and that is why we concentrate on being the UK’s Best and to my knowledge the only Gift Basket company in Europe.

Other companies may pretend, but all they do is optimise for the term. We built our company around the imagination, the creativity and the concept which you associate with the Gift Basket industry in North America. And as our strap line says, we do hampers with gift basket style and panache.

We now offer all sorts of gift baskets from £19.99 to £5000, we offer ready made, we offer create your own, we offer baby baskets and we offer a luxury gourmet hamper division centred around Ireland. We operate in 3 different countries and our prices keep getting lower as more and more people find us, like us and spread the word about our existence.

So is there a difference between a UK Hamper and a UK Gift Basket. The answer is categorically yes, it’s more than just mere terminology as far as Basketsgalore is concerned. Moreover it is a historical quirk of fate based on the convergence of a series of circumstances from many years ago.

We invite our international visitors in particular to peruse our little site and tell us if we are on the right lines.

Basketsgalore