Engraved corporate gifts: materials, quantities and lead times

Every fall the same question comes around the office: what are we giving this year. The default answer is a printed item ordered online, handed out in December and forgotten by February. The other answer costs a little more per unit, goes to fewer people, and is still on someone's desk five years later.

An engraved object and a promotional item do different jobs

Both put a logo in front of someone. They are two different tools.

• The promotional item is printed, mass-produced and designed to be handed out widely. Its unit cost is low and so is its lifespan.
• The engraved object carries a physical mark in the material. It does not wash off, does not peel, and ages with the object.
• The first goes to a hundred people at a trade show booth. The second goes to ten employees who carried the year, or to a client whose contract just renewed.

This is not a value judgment, it is a question of use. We do not produce printed promotional items. We engrave objects meant to be kept.

What engraves well, and how it looks

The laser deposits nothing: it removes material or transforms it with heat. The result therefore depends entirely on the substrate.

What a CO2 laser cannot engrave: bare metal. We work around that with coated metal objects, where the laser removes the coating and reveals the metal underneath. The result is crisp and permanent.

Ten, fifty, two hundred

Quantity changes more than the price. It changes how the work is produced, and that is what explains the cost curve.

• Under ten units, each piece is positioned by hand. Setup time dominates the cost. This is the format for executive gifts and one-off pieces.
• From ten to fifty, we build a positioning jig. The jig is paid for once and collapses the time per piece.
• Past fifty, the engraving bed becomes the limiting factor. Ours covers 915 x 458 mm in one pass, which lets us engrave several objects per cycle rather than one at a time.
• At two hundred units and up, sourcing the raw material becomes the real lead time, not the engraving.

A useful consequence for your budget: unit price drops quickly between ten and fifty, then much more slowly. If you are torn between thirty and fifty units, the total cost difference is often smaller than you expect.

Technical sheet for the CO2 laser used at the workshop (xTool P3, 80 W)

Your logo: what we need

• A vector file: AI, EPS, SVG or vector PDF. It is the only form that scales without losing sharpness.
• A single-colour logo, or a version that works in monochrome. Engraving does not render colour, it renders contrast.
• Strokes of at least 0.3 mm at final size. Any finer and the stroke disappears or fills in.
• No subtle gradients on a logo destined for wood. Wood has its own grain, which muddies delicate halftones.

If all you have is a JPEG or a PNG, we can redraw the logo as vector. It is short but real work, billed separately, and you leave with a file you can reuse everywhere else.

The uses that come back

• Employee recognition. Five, ten or twenty years of service, with the name and year engraved.
• Year-end client gifts. Often a board, a coaster or an engraved bottle.
• Conferences and events. Trophies, speaker plaques, sponsor gifts.
• Memorial and donor plaques, for non-profits and municipalities.
• Business openings and anniversaries. Items given to project partners or first customers.

How ordering works

1. You give us the quantity, the occasion, and a per-unit budget if you have one.
2. We propose two or three object and material combinations that fit inside it.
3. You send the vector logo and the exact text.
4. We produce a physical engraved sample, which you approve before the run.
5. Production, packing, then delivery or shipping.

The physical sample is not a formality. Engraving on wood varies with species and grain, and a logo that looks crisp on screen sometimes needs a contrast adjustment on the real piece. Better to find that out on one piece than on fifty.

Frequently asked questions