Handing Out Branded Merchandise in a Hybrid Bangalore Office

A bulk merchandise order ends with a signed delivery note and boxes in a store room, and in a hybrid Bangalore office that is where a surprising number of them stay. Handing the stock out is a separate piece of work from buying it: it needs a named owner, a window rather than a day, and a short record of who took what. Get those three right and four hundred branded T-shirts become four hundred people wearing them. Get them wrong and you are still opening the same carton in April, looking for a medium.

Why does a merchandise handout stall after the delivery?

Mostly because nobody owns it. The order has an owner — whoever raised the purchase order, approved the artwork and counted the cartons against the delivery note — and that person's job genuinely ends when the count matches. Giving items to several hundred individuals is a different task with a different shape. It happens at a reception counter rather than a loading bay, it runs over days rather than minutes, and it has no natural finish line, so it never gets declared done.

In an office where everyone came in five days a week, the missing owner did not matter much. The boxes sat in a corridor and emptied themselves. With two or three anchor days a week, and engineering choosing Tuesday while sales chooses Thursday, they do not empty themselves at all. The second reason is timing: the handout gets planned, if at all, for the week the stock lands, which is the same week the admin team is reconciling the invoice. Published turnaround on a bulk order is ten days from artwork approval, so the arrival week is known well in advance. Fix the handout window when you place the order, not when the boxes appear.

Who should run the merchandise handout?

One named person per site, with a named stand-in for the days they are not in. Not a committee, and not the admin team as a group — a group owns the stock and nobody owns the list.

• A single named owner per office or floor, plus a deputy. Two names, written down.
• A fixed location people can find without asking: reception, the pantry counter, or a meeting room booked for the purpose. Moving it halfway through loses everyone who had already heard where it was.
• A window, not a day. Two anchor days in the same week reach far more of a hybrid team than one morning does.
• A list of names to tick off, held by that one owner, so that 'has Priya collected hers' has an answer that is not a guess.

Devolving the handout to team managers sounds efficient and usually is not. The stock splits into boxes nobody can reconcile, sizes get traded between teams informally, and you end up with two managers each short of mediums and no way to tell whether the shortfall is real or filed in someone's drawer. Keep the stock in one place and let people come to it.

How do you reach employees who are not in the office that week?

There are two groups here and they need different answers. The first is hybrid staff in Bangalore who were simply not in during the window. The second is people in another city or another country who were never going to be.

For the first group, a two-day window plus the tick-list usually does it, and whatever is left after that goes into a labelled box with the names on it rather than drifting back into general stock. The distinction matters: an item set aside for a named person is still that person's, and an item back in the pile has to be handed out twice. Nobody in Bangalore is making a long cross-city commute to collect a T-shirt, so do not build the plan on the assumption that they will.

For the second group, courier the items, and do it as part of the original order rather than as an afterthought. Individual pan-India dispatch is a published part of a merchandise order: you supply a sheet of names, cities, pincodes and phone numbers, each item ships separately with its own tracking link, and the published timelines are around two days to metro cities, three to four days to Tier-2 cities and five to seven days to remote pincodes. Done at order time that is one extra spreadsheet column. Done two months later it is a repack, a separate dispatch, and nobody left who remembers which sizes were set aside for whom.

Collect the phone numbers properly, because they matter more than people expect. A courier who cannot reach the recipient returns the parcel to origin, and a returned branded T-shirt is one you now have to hand out a second time, at your cost and from a carton you thought was closed.

What do you do when an employee's size is wrong?

Expect it, and decide in advance how much of it you can absorb. Apparel runs from XS to 5XL, and a size someone typed into a form two months earlier is a statement of intent rather than a measurement. A proportion of your order will come back for a swap no matter how carefully the sizes were collected. There are three ways to deal with it and they are not equally priced.

• A swap pool: a small number of unallocated pieces in the middle sizes, held back deliberately on the first order. Much the cheapest fix, because you have already paid for it.
• An open swap window, where people who need a different size trade with each other in front of the owner and the list gets updated as they do. Free, and it clears most of what the pool does not.
• A top-up order, which is the expensive option. Published minimum order is 100 units per design for most items and 50 for premium pieces like jackets and backpacks; below 50 units the pieces are sourced from the open market at slightly higher unit cost. Production turnaround on a top-up is the same ten days, so a handful of wrong sizes becomes a second order and a second wait.

Which is the whole argument for building the buffer into the first order. A few spare mediums are cheap when they are part of a production run and expensive when they are a separate one.

What happens to the merchandise nobody collects?

Something deliberate, within a few weeks — not 'leave it in the store room and see'. Branded stock has a shelf life, and the limit is rarely the fabric. It is whether the logo printed on it is still the logo you use, and whether the design is still one people recognise as current.

• Allocate the remainder to the next intake. New joiners are the natural destination and a welcome kit assembled from stock you already hold costs nothing new.
• Store it sealed and off the floor. A store room through a Bengaluru monsoon is not kind to printed cotton left in an open carton.
• Set a date to stop holding it. Stock that has survived two intakes is not going to be claimed, and the cupboard space is worth more than the stock.

One thing worth planning around rather than discovering: if a brand refresh is known to be coming, run the existing stock down before it lands instead of carrying cartons across the change. Surplus that outlives the logo on it is not surplus, it is waste with a storage cost.

What should you record on handout day?

Less than a formal issue register, more than nothing. Four columns on a shared sheet is the right weight for most offices.

• Name, item, size, date collected. That is the sheet.
• For anything couriered out of Bangalore, who signed for it, taken from the proof of delivery for that shipment.
• The count still unclaimed at the end of the window, broken down by size.
• Which sizes ran short before the window closed.

That last line is the one worth the effort. Which sizes ran out is the correction for next year's size ratio, it is only knowable on handout day, and it is lost the moment the boxes are flattened. Every other benefit of running the handout properly is about this year's order; that one improves the next one.