Despite Hayley’s initial scepticism, the ideas machine was at full throttle.
Emma’s three children were all at primary school and the party scene could rival anything in Hollywood. With 30 kids in each class, the customary thing to do was to invite everyone to everything, so Emma was either going to or holding a birthday party every week.
Sadly, a lot of lovely but unwanted presents were bought.
Some were not even being opened and taken to the next party to give to someone else.
It was like a surreal pass the parcel game.
Meanwhile, Hayley was also aware of the wasteful gifting culture wafting in the air.
Hayley’s mother, who was a carer, was receiving so many tins of biscuits at Christmas from her patients that she was giving most of them away at the next village raffle.
Her challenge was hoping there were enough raffles before they all went out of date.
Then sadly, Hayley’s grandad passed away.
When they opened his “man drawer”, over 100 new leather wallets, gifted by many grandchildren, were unearthed.
He hadn’t used them, but hadn’t wanted to get rid of them either, bless him. Token gifts!
Well-meant and the sentiment was appreciated but did people really need all this stuff?
It’s lovely to get a gift but the sentiment of the gift is surely more important than the gift itself?
So Emma and Hayley busied themselves for nine months developing the ultimate token gift.
It had to deliver the sentiment and ideally be a little thing that could not easily be bought or not needed in quantity and it had to fit in a matchbox, just because!
That matchbox had to be well designed, based on the nostalgic matchbox labels
It had to look beautiful, be affordable and not matter if it got thrown away - gifting should be about the emotional connection not material goods.
How hard could it be…?
