The Hidden Waste of Corporate Holiday Gifting: What Happens to Unwanted Corporate Gifts?

Last updated: September 16, 2026

Corporate holiday gifts are meant to create appreciation, recognition, and goodwill. But the value of a gift isn't determined by delivery alone. What happens when the recipient doesn't actually want or use it?

An unwanted gift may stay with the recipient but go underused. It may be regifted or donated to someone else. Or it may eventually be discarded. These outcomes look very different, but they raise the same underlying question: did the gift create meaningful value for the person it was intended for?

For companies, this creates a blind spot. They can track what they spend, what they order, and whether a gift was delivered, but they often know far less about what happens afterward. A gift may sit unused for months. It may leave the intended recipient. It may eventually become physical waste.

This review examines what happens to unwanted corporate holiday gifts after they are received. It brings together peer-reviewed research with recent consumer and industry evidence to explore three outcomes associated with hidden waste: underuse, recipient-value loss, and eventual physical waste.

Waste Points in Corporate Holiday Gifting 

Waste in corporate holiday gifting does not only happen when a gift is thrown away. It can also happen when gifts are kept but rarely used, passed along, or fail to create meaningful value for the employee who receives them. The three waste points below show where corporate holiday gifts are most likely to lose value for employees:

Waste Point #1: Unwanted Gifts That Stay With the Recipient but Go Underused

Some unwanted corporate holiday gifts are never thrown away. They are simply kept and rarely used.

A product may remain in a closet, drawer, cupboard, garage, or office for months or years. In that case, the gift still exists, but it may create very little practical value for the recipient.

PPAI's 2026 branded-merchandise research, based on more than 3,400 U.S. consumers, found that nearly 90% kept branded merchandise for regular or occasional use (PPAI Research, 2026). However, the publicly available findings do not clearly show how often those retained products were actually used. Someone who uses a product every week and someone who uses it only a few times a year may both still be counted as keeping it.

This distinction matters because keeping a gift is not the same as using it meaningfully.

Usefulness appears particularly important. In the same PPAI research, 55% of respondents identified usefulness in daily life as the main reason they kept branded merchandise, while 21% cited high quality (PPAI Research, 2026). Separate PPAI research from 2025 found that 57% kept their most recent promotional product because it was useful in everyday life (PPAI Research, 2025).

Earlier gift-disposition research also identified storage as one possible response to an unwanted or disliked gift, alongside returning, donating, or discarding it (Sherry et al., 1992).

For corporate holiday gifting, this creates a form of hidden waste. The company has already spent resources producing, branding, packaging, and delivering the gift, but the recipient may receive little practical value from it if the product remains mostly unused.

The key distinction is: A gift can be kept without being meaningfully used.

Waste Point #2: Unwanted Gifts That Are Regifted or Given Away

Some unwanted corporate holiday gifts are not thrown away. Instead, they are regifted, donated, exchanged, or resold.

Consumer-behavior research has examined regifting as a distinct practice (Swilley et al., 2014), while broader gift-disposition research identifies donation, exchange, sale, and other forms of transfer as documented ways people deal with gifts they do not want (Weinberger et al., 2025).

Recent Christmas research provides a useful example. A nationally representative Irish survey of 1,012 consumers, commissioned by the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission in 2025, asked what people would do with an unwanted Christmas gift when they did not have a receipt (CCPC, 2025). Thirty-two percent said they would regift it, 17% would donate it to charity or fundraising, and 5% would try to exchange it.

These figures should not be treated as corporate-gifting rates because the study examined Christmas gifts generally rather than gifts from employers. What the findings do show is that an unwanted gift can leave the original recipient without immediately becoming physical waste.

For example, imagine that an employer sends a holiday gift to an employee who does not want it. The employee gives it to a family member, who then uses it regularly.

The product itself has not necessarily been wasted because someone is still using it. However, the company's original gift may not have created much value for the employee it was intended for.

For the purposes of this review, this can be described as recipient-value loss: the intended recipient does not receive enough value from the gift to keep or use it.

Regifting, donation, exchange, or resale can therefore represent recipient-value loss without necessarily creating physical waste. The product may continue to have a useful life, even though the original corporate gift did not achieve its intended value for the recipient.

This distinction also shows why simply counting how many gifts were delivered gives an incomplete picture. A company may know that every employee received a holiday gift while knowing very little about how many of those gifts were actually kept and used by the people they were intended for.

The key distinction is: A gift can lose value for the intended recipient without the product itself being wasted.

Waste Point #3: Unwanted Gifts That Eventually Get Discarded

The clearest form of corporate holiday gift waste is when an unwanted gift is eventually thrown away. But that may not happen right away. The gift may first sit unused, remain in storage, or be passed to someone else before it is finally discarded.

GiftAFeeling's Shared Secrets Lab (TSSL) highlighted this issue in its 2026 review of corporate gifting research, which cites an industry estimate suggesting that approximately 40% of corporate gifts end up in the trash (TSSL, 2026).

The figure points to the potential scale of the problem, but corporate holiday-specific disposal research remains limited. Current evidence does not yet provide a precise measure of how many corporate holiday gifts are ultimately discarded.

Branded-merchandise research provides more detail about why products may leave circulation. PPAI's 2026 study found that among respondents who discarded or gave away branded merchandise, 38% cited lack of usefulness and 27% cited poor quality (PPAI Research, 2026).

These figures do not tell us what percentage of all branded merchandise is actually thrown away. Instead, they identify the reasons reported by people whose products were either discarded or transferred.

Broader Christmas research shows the same distinction. The Australia Institute reported in 2024, based on a survey of 1,009 Australians, that 27% expected to receive a Christmas gift they would never use or wear (The Australia Institute, 2024). However, an unused gift is not necessarily a discarded gift. It may remain in storage, be regifted, donated, resold, recycled, or eventually thrown away.

This means the path from an unwanted gift to physical waste can be more complex:

unwanted → underused or stored → possibly transferred → possibly discarded later

The key distinction is: Unwanted does not mean immediately discarded. A gift may sit unused, remain in storage, or be passed on before it becomes physical waste.

Current research shows that disposal is one possible outcome, but it does not yet tell us how frequently corporate holiday gifts actually reach that point.

What Happens to Unwanted Corporate Holiday Gifts?

Taken together, the evidence reviewed here suggests that unwanted corporate holiday gifts do not have one single destination. After they are received, they generally follow one of several paths:

• Kept but underused: The recipient keeps the gift, but it may spend most of its time unused or in storage.
• Regifted, donated, or passed on: The gift leaves the intended recipient but may continue to be useful to someone else.
• Eventually discarded: Some gifts may remain unused for months or years before eventually becoming physical waste.

For the recipient, the journey may look something like this:

received → underused or stored → regifted, donated, or passed on → reused by someone else or eventually discarded

These outcomes are important to separate. If an employee gives an unwanted gift to a family member who uses it regularly, the gift may have created little value for the employee, but the product itself has not necessarily been wasted.

If the gift remains in a closet or drawer for years, it represents underuse. If it is eventually thrown away, it becomes physical waste.

The key distinction is: an unwanted corporate gift can lose value for the person it was intended for without immediately becoming physical waste.

For companies, this means delivery alone does not show whether a holiday gift was successful. Knowing that an employee received a gift does not reveal whether it was regularly used, stored, passed on to someone else, or eventually discarded.

Understanding what happens after the gift is received is therefore essential to measuring the real waste associated with corporate holiday gifting.

What the Research Still Cannot Tell Us

The biggest gap in the current evidence is the lack of long-term, corporate-specific research tracking what actually happens to holiday gifts after they are received.

Existing studies identify several possible outcomes, including storage, regifting, donation, exchange, resale, recycling, and disposal. However, this review did not identify reliable studies showing how frequently corporate holiday gifts follow each of these outcomes.

Much of the existing research on how people deal with unwanted gifts focuses on gifts exchanged between friends and family. Corporate gifts may be treated differently because employees usually did not choose or buy the gift themselves, the product may include company branding, and the relationship between an employer and employee is different from a personal relationship.

Until more research tracks what actually happens to corporate holiday gifts over time, it is difficult to say exactly how much waste corporate holiday gifting creates.

The key research gap is: we know what can happen to an unwanted corporate holiday gift, but we still do not know how often each outcome occurs.

Methodology

This literature and evidence review combines peer-reviewed research on gift exchange, gift disposition, and regifting with more recent consumer and industry research on branded merchandise, Christmas gifting, and corporate gifting.

The review focuses on one central question: what happens to an unwanted gift after it is received? Evidence was considered where it helped explain outcomes such as underuse, storage, regifting, donation, exchange, resale, recycling, and disposal.

Corporate holiday gifting has not been studied extensively as a standalone subject. Where corporate-specific research was limited, broader consumer and Christmas-gifting studies were used where relevant. Those findings are identified as broader evidence rather than presented as corporate holiday-gifting rates.

The review also distinguishes between different types of evidence. Peer-reviewed academic research is used primarily to establish how researchers understand gift exchange, gift disposition, and regifting. Recent industry research and consumer surveys are used to provide additional evidence about current behaviors and patterns.

Where statistics are included, the review relies on the original research source where available and avoids using broader consumer findings as if they specifically measured corporate holiday gifting.

The review also separates underuse, recipient-value loss, and physical waste. A gift that is rarely used is not treated as equivalent to a gift that is discarded. Similarly, a gift that is regifted or donated may lose value for the original recipient while continuing to be useful to someone else.

The purpose of this review is not to calculate a single corporate holiday gift-waste rate. Instead, it identifies the main outcomes unwanted gifts may follow and distinguishes between what the available evidence supports and what remains unknown.

FAQs

What percentage of corporate holiday gifts actually go to waste?

There is no reliable figure showing what percentage of corporate holiday gifts actually become physical waste. One industry estimate cited by GiftAFeeling's Shared Secrets Lab suggests that approximately 40% of corporate gifts end up in the trash, but this review treats that figure cautiously because its underlying methodology is not well documented. Current research instead shows that unwanted gifts may be underused, passed on, or eventually discarded, and no current study tracks how often each outcome occurs specifically for corporate holiday gifts.

What's the difference between an unwanted gift and a wasted gift?

An unwanted gift is not necessarily a wasted gift. It may be kept but rarely used, regifted to someone else, donated, exchanged, or eventually discarded. For the purposes of this review, a gift becomes physical waste once it is discarded. Treating "unwanted" and "wasted" as interchangeable can therefore blur important differences between outcomes. This review separates underuse, recipient-value loss, and physical waste as distinct outcomes.

If someone regifts or donates a corporate gift, is that still waste?

Not necessarily in the physical sense. The product may continue to be used by someone else, meaning it has not necessarily become physical waste at that point. However, it may still represent what this review calls recipient-value loss: the company spent money trying to create appreciation for a specific employee, but the gift did not create enough value for that person to keep or use it.

Are branded or logoed items more likely to be discarded than unbranded ones?

The evidence is limited and mostly indirect. PPAI's 2026 research found that among respondents who discarded or gave away branded merchandise, the leading reasons cited were lack of usefulness (38%) and poor quality (27%). No study in this review isolates branding as a standalone factor in disposal decisions, so it is not currently possible to determine whether branded items are more likely to be discarded than unbranded ones.

What can companies learn from the research about reducing hidden waste?

The available research suggests that usefulness and quality are important reasons people keep branded merchandise, but it does not directly test strategies for reducing corporate holiday gift waste. PPAI's 2026 research found that 55% identified usefulness in daily life as the main reason they kept branded merchandise, while 21% cited high quality. These findings suggest that companies may benefit from considering expected use and product quality rather than measuring gifting success by delivery alone.

References

Competition and Consumer Protection Commission. (2025). CCPC Post-Christmas Research 2025. Nationally representative research conducted by Ipsos B&A among 1,012 consumers in Ireland.

GiftAFeeling, Shared Secrets Lab (TSSL). (2026). 249+ Corporate Gifting Statistics That Reveal What Really Works. GiftAFeeling.

PPAI Research. (2025). PPAI Research: The 5-Second Impact. Promotional Products Association International.

PPAI Research. (2026). The Things We Don't Throw Away. Promotional Products Association International.

Sherry, J. F., Jr. (1983). Gift giving in anthropological perspective. Journal of Consumer Research, 10(2), 157–168. DOI: 10.1086/208956.

Sherry, J. F., Jr., McGrath, M. A., & Levy, S. J. (1992). The disposition of the gift and many unhappy returns. Journal of Retailing, 68(1), 40–65.

Swilley, E., Cowart, K. O., & Flynn, L. R. (2014). An examination of regifting. Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 13(4), 251–261. DOI: 10.1002/cb.1463.

The Australia Institute. (2024). Polling: Christmas Waste 2024. Research by Nina Gbor and Alexia Adhikari.

Weinberger, M. F., Baskin, E., & Gunasti, K. (2025). Relational gifting: Conceptual frameworks and an agenda for a new generation of research. Journal of Consumer Research, 51(6), 1252–1278. DOI: 10.1093/jcr/ucae042.