Every year, HR and Internal Comms teams at large organizations spend thousands of dollars on branded merchandise programs — onboarding kits, holiday gifts, recognition items, company milestones. And every year, those items land in closets, get donated, or get thrown away by employees who didn’t want them in the first place.
We’ve known this anecdotally for decades. What we didn’t have was data — large-scale, enterprise-specific, from the employee’s perspective.
That’s what the SwagDrop 2026 Employee Swag & Choice Gap Study set out to produce. An independent survey of 2,500 fully employed workers at companies with 250 or more employees, conducted across Canada and the United States in May 2026. Not a buyer survey. Not a platform vendor’s research. A recipient survey — asking the people who open the boxes what they actually thought.
What we found was harder to hear than we expected, and more commercially useful than we hoped.
| RESEARCH HERITAGE This is the third primary research study SwagDrop (formerly Promotion Resource Group) has commissioned in its 34-year history. In 2006, PRG partnered with Advanis Research on a buyer and recipient study that found branded merchandise outperformed television advertising for customer loyalty by 56% to 13%, with 100% brand recall across all recipient categories. The findings were covered in the Globe and Mail and Strategy Magazine. In 2012, PRG commissioned Project SWAG, a mobile ethnographic study using trained anthropologist strategists that introduced the concept of employees as curators of their professional identity — the insight that directly underpins the on-demand model. The 2026 Employee Swag & Choice Gap Study is the third chapter in that 20-year arc. It is the first to quantify the gap at national scale, across two countries, from the recipient’s perspective. |
The Choice Gap — Why Getting It Right Is Harder Than It Looks
When we asked 2,500 North American employees how well the last piece of branded merchandise they received matched their personal preferences, only 30.5% said it was exactly what they would have chosen for themselves.
The remaining 69.5% fell into one of three categories: they liked it but wouldn’t have chosen it (33.0%), they already owned something similar (22.4%), or they didn’t want it and didn’t keep it (14.1%).
That 22.4% who already owned something similar is the number that keeps coming up in our client conversations. It represents a specific, preventable failure mode: not poor taste, but poor information. In an on-demand program, that employee would simply not have selected the item they already owned. The redundancy is eliminated structurally. [INTERNAL LINK: What Is On-Demand Swag? A Complete Guide]
The miss rate was higher in Canada (72.7%) than in the United States (67.5%). Both numbers are significant. Neither is a rounding error.
| “Nearly 7 in 10 North American employees say their last piece of company swag missed the mark. In Canada, that number climbs to nearly 3 in 4.” — SwagDrop 2026 Employee Swag & Choice Gap Study, North America, n=2,500, May 2026 |
The Self-Selection Finding — What Employees Would Choose Instead
We asked employees to choose between three options: receive a company-chosen item, choose their own item from a curated selection within a set budget, or receive nothing at all rather than a generic item.
77.0% of North American employees chose self-selection. 18.2% chose the company-chosen model. And 4.8% said they would prefer to receive nothing at all.
That last number deserves a moment. Nearly 1 in 20 employees at large organizations would rather opt out entirely than receive another generic item. In an on-demand program, that employee simply doesn’t redeem. No waste, no cost, no landfill. The opt-out finding is not a failure of the model — it’s a validation of it.
Canadian employees showed a stronger preference for self-selection (79.8%) than American employees (75.2%). Both numbers point in the same direction. [INTERNAL LINK: 4 Reasons Why Corporate Swag Gets Ignored]
| “Fewer than 1 in 5 North American employees prefer the current model. The remaining 4 in 5 want either a choice or nothing.” — SwagDrop 2026 Employee Swag & Choice Gap Study, North America, n=2,500, May 2026 |
The Waste Story — What Happens After the Box Is Opened
37.9% of North American employees still use the last item they received regularly. That leaves 52.5% who own it but rarely use it, donated it, or threw it away entirely.
14.0% are entirely gone — donated to a charity shop or discarded. That is the number with a direct budget implication: the item was procured, shipped, received, and produced zero ongoing engagement.
The remaining 38.6% who own it but rarely use it are not actively brand ambassadors. They are not wearing the hoodie on Zoom calls. They are not carrying the tumbler to meetings. The item is in a closet, gathering dust, as Mark Jackson puts it, and it is not doing anybody any good. [INTERNAL LINK: 5 Hidden Costs of Bulk Swag Programs]
The Onboarding Crisis — The First Impression Most Organizations Are Skipping
44.2% of North American employees at companies with 250 or more employees received no branded merchandise or welcome kit when they started their current job. In Canada that number was 49.6%. In the United States it was 40.7%.
Of those who did receive a kit, only 25.4% said it made them feel genuinely valued from day one. 19.5% described it as generic and impersonal. 6.8% said it arrived too late to make any impression.
The employees who said they don’t remember receiving anything can reasonably be added to the ‘received nothing’ cohort. An unmemorable welcome kit is functionally equivalent to no kit at all.
The onboarding moment is irreversible. The first impression cannot be remade. And the data says the majority of large organizations are either skipping it entirely or delivering it in a way that does not land.
On-demand programs are specifically designed to solve this. A welcome store link, sent before day one, with a curated selection of items and a set per-employee budget, produces a kit that the employee chose themselves, in their size, shipped to their home address. No inventory. No guessing. No duty bills at the door for Canadian employees. [INTERNAL LINK: Employees in Canada Had to Pay Duties for Company Swag]
| “Nearly half of Canadian new hires and more than 4 in 10 American new hires at large organizations received no welcome kit. Of those who did, fewer than 1 in 3 said it made them feel genuinely valued.”— SwagDrop 2026 Employee Swag & Choice Gap Study, North America, n=2,500, May 2026 |
The Year-Round Recognition Gap — When Employees Actually Want to Be Recognized
We asked employees to select their top two moments for receiving recognition from their employer, beyond onboarding and the holidays.
Work anniversaries ranked first, selected by 54.1% of North American respondents. Personal milestones — promotions, completing a big project — ranked second at 30.9%. Random appreciation with no specific occasion ranked third at 27.7%. Seasonal and holiday moments ranked fourth at 30.1%.
The Valentine’s Day principle applies here. You cannot repair a relationship with one exceptional gift if you have neglected it all year. Employees naming anniversaries and personal milestones as their preferred recognition moments are describing a distributed, year-round relationship — not a back-loaded holiday program.
Non-holiday recognition moments were selected by employees more than four times as often as holiday moments in aggregate. Most corporate merchandise budgets are allocated in Q4 for Q4 delivery. The data suggests that structure is addressing a fraction of the moments that actually matter. [INTERNAL LINK: How to Only Pay for Claimed Employee Gifts]
The HR Confidence Gap — Employees Are Skeptical Their Teams Can Get It Right
34.2% of North American employees rated the people responsible for their company’s employee gifts and branded merchandise as having low or no understanding of what employees actually want. In Canada that number was 40.6%. In the United States it was 29.9%.
That 10.7 percentage point gap between Canada and the United States is the most significant country-specific divergence in the study. Canadian employees at large organizations are meaningfully more skeptical of their HR team’s swag decision-making than their American counterparts.
This is not a criticism of HR professionals. It is a structural problem. The larger the organization, the harder it is for any person or team to know what 2,000 employees across multiple offices, income levels, and life stages actually want to receive. The anonymity problem — where HR is genuinely guessing for people they have never met — is not solvable through better taste. It is solvable through better process.
Methodology
The SwagDrop 2026 Employee Swag & Choice Gap Study is an independent online survey of 2,500 fully employed workers at organizations with 250 or more employees across Canada (n=1,000, launched May 4, 2026) and the United States (n=1,500, launched May 11, 2026). Both cohorts used an identical 10-question instrument. Respondents were required to be full-time employees at companies with 250 or more employees; those at smaller organizations were screened out. Both panels were post-stratified by age and gender to reflect national workforce demographics. The combined North American figures presented throughout this report represent a weighted average of the two national cohorts (Canada 40%, United States 60%), proportional to each cohort’s share of the total sample.
About SwagDrop
SwagDrop, has been designing and delivering branded merchandise programs for enterprise organizations since 1992. We specialize in on-demand, store-based programs for companies with 500 to 5,000 employees across North America, with domestic production and fulfillment in both the United States and Canada. The 2026 Employee Swag & Choice Gap Study is the third primary research initiative in SwagDrop’s 34-year history, and the first in a planned annual series of workforce research on employee experience and branded merchandise programs.
