Someone is leaving after twenty-two years. The collection envelope has been round three floors and raised £340. There is a card that eighty people have signed, most of them with "all the best".
And now somebody has to decide what to actually buy, usually the week before, usually while doing their own job. The default outcome is a voucher and a bottle of something, which is not wrong, but is a strange way to mark two decades.
Below, what to do instead, organised by what the money and the time will actually stretch to.
Why retirement gifts are unusually hard
Three things make this harder than a birthday.
You are marking a career, not a person. You may know them well professionally and barely at all otherwise. Buying for their private life is guesswork; buying for their working life risks handing someone a memento of the thing they have just escaped.
The audience is enormous and uneven. Eighty contributors, of whom six know them properly. Whatever you choose has to make sense to the person who sat next to them for a decade and to the person who joined in March.
They will say they want nothing. Almost universally, and usually sincerely. This is not permission to do nothing. It is a constraint that rules out anything extravagant and points toward things whose value is not obvious from the price.
What works
The assembled contribution
Messages, photographs, stories and thanks collected from everyone who has worked with them, including people who left years ago, bound properly or edited into a film.
This is the highest-return option available and it is nearly free. The value is entirely in the reach: tracking down the colleague who moved to Australia in 2014 is what makes it land. Budget six weeks and a co-conspirator with access to old contact lists.
Suits: every retirement. The baseline that everything else sits on top of.
Something tied to what they are retiring into
Not a memento of the job. Equipment, membership or lessons for whatever they have said they are finally going to do: the allotment, the boat, the walking, the grandchildren, the thing they have mentioned in every conversation for two years.
The trick is that you almost certainly already know what this is, because they have told you repeatedly. Listening back is the whole task.
Suits: anyone with a clearly stated plan. Fails badly if you are guessing.
Commissioned work
An illustrator, a writer, a printmaker, a studio. Something made about them that could not exist otherwise.
This is our category, so treat the following as informed rather than neutral.
A bespoke game casts the retiring colleague as the protagonist of something playable, hand-painted from photographs, with colleagues painted in around them. For a leaving do specifically, it solves several of the problems above at once:
- It is about the career without being a memento of the job. The running jokes, the projects that went wrong, the catchphrase everyone imitates. Those go in the brief and come out as a story rather than a plaque.
- It works for a large, uneven audience. It arrives as a private web link that works on any phone, so it can be opened in front of the whole room and then passed around. Colleagues who find themselves painted into it show the person next to them.
- It fits what a collection actually raises. The 1-Bit tier from £99 is one themed level with up to three cameos. The 8-Bit tier from £349 covers three cinematic levels, a boss encounter, up to twelve painted cameos, an original soundtrack and intro and outro cutscenes, which sits neatly inside what a department-wide collection typically reaches.
- They keep it. The build is theirs to keep, share and replay long after the event. It does not need dusting and it does not sit in a drawer.
The 16-Bit tier from £1,200 adds a full-length build with unlimited cameos and an arcade tournament mode, which is worth knowing about if the collection is unusually large or the leaver is unusually senior. Our cost guide explains what moves the price between tiers, and the commissions page lists exactly what each one contains.
Suits: long-serving colleagues with a strong personality and a lot of shared history. Departments that can organise photographs quietly.
The properly chosen object
If it is going to be an object, make it one thing chosen carefully rather than three chosen quickly. Something made by a person, ideally engraved or inscribed with something specific rather than "on your retirement".
The inscription is where these succeed or fail. A date and a job title is a plaque. A line from something they always said is a gift.
Suits: traditional workplaces, senior leavers, anyone who would find a game or a film uncomfortable.
Time, given back
An extra day, a long lunch that runs into the afternoon, a proper send-off held during working hours rather than squeezed into a Friday evening that half the team cannot attend.
Costs the organisation something and the collection nothing, and it is frequently the part people remember.
Suits: everywhere. Requires someone with authority to agree it.
How to decide
How much did the collection raise, and how many contributed? A large sum from few people points toward one considered object. A modest sum from many points toward assembled contributions, where the number of contributors is itself the gift.
Do you know what they are retiring into? If yes, that is the strongest option available. If you are guessing, do not.
Is there a send-off with a room full of people? If yes, you want something that can be opened in front of everyone: a film, a book of messages, a link handed over on a phone. If there is no gathering, that consideration disappears and a private object makes more sense.
How to run the collection properly
The collection is usually the weakest part of the whole exercise, and improving it costs nothing.
Say what it is for. An envelope with "Dave's retirement" written on it raises less than a message explaining what is being bought and why. People give more when they know the money is going somewhere considered rather than into a generic pot.
Name a figure and make opting out invisible. Suggest an amount, collect digitally, and make sure nobody can see who gave what or who gave nothing. Junior staff and part-time colleagues should not be quietly priced out of signing the card.
Reach beyond the current team. The people whose contributions will matter most are frequently the ones who left five years ago. Twenty minutes spent finding four former colleagues will do more for the final gift than another fifty pounds in the envelope.
Separate the money from the messages. Ask for both, but do not make the message conditional on the contribution. Some of the best material will come from people who cannot give anything, and some of the largest contributions will arrive with nothing written at all.
Close it early. Whatever deadline you set, the money arrives on the last day. Set the deadline three weeks before the send-off so you still have time to spend it on something that requires making.
The mistake to avoid
Leaving it to the week before. Every genuinely good option on this list needs three to six weeks: collecting messages, tracking down former colleagues, gathering photographs, commissioning anything at all. The voucher exists because it is the only thing that survives being decided on a Tuesday for a Friday.
If you are organising the send-off itself rather than the gift, the entertainment side is covered in corporate event entertainment ideas. And if the commissioned route is the one you are weighing, the process is documented here, including exactly what we need from you and how little it turns out to be.
