Shipping Branded Merchandise to Employees in Multiple Countries, from India

Companies that get this right do one thing: they produce the whole order once, in one place, and then split the dispatch into two legs, a domestic one and an export one, planned backwards from the single date everyone is meant to have it. The production run does not change because part of the roster sits abroad. What changes is the dispatch, and the export leg is slower, needs more information per person, and ends with a courier at somebody's door in another country. From Bengaluru that leg runs via DHL, FedEx or Aramex to 30-plus countries, typically in 5 to 10 business days, with the customs declaration, HS codes and commercial invoice prepared at this end. The mechanics, in other words, are solved and bookable. What actually goes wrong is the planning around them, and that is what this is about.

Should your overseas employees be in the same order at all?

The argument for one production run is that it is the only way everyone ends up with the same object. Order separately in each country and you get a different fabric weight, a different fit, a different print process and a logo that reads slightly differently in each market, which defeats the point of branded merchandise. The whole value is that a photograph of the Bengaluru team and a photograph of the team two time zones away look like the same company.

The argument against is that the export leg is the slow, expensive and socially awkward part of the order. International courier is billed at the carrier's published rates, and import duty at the destination is normally paid by the recipient, which means a parcel you sent as a gesture can arrive as a small bill for the person receiving it.

So the useful version of the decision is per item rather than per person. Ask of each line whether it is worth its own international shipment. A hoodie and a steel bottle are heavy and bulky and will dominate the courier cost of whatever carton they sit in.

• Good candidates for the export leg: flat, light, non-perishable items with a low declared value, such as apparel, notebooks, lanyards, caps and stickers.
• Confirm first: anything containing a battery, which each carrier handles under its own dangerous-goods rules, so check before you design a kit around one.
• Better kept domestic: bulky or heavy items whose shipping cost approaches the value of the item itself.

There is a middle path worth naming, because most teams never consider it. Send the overseas tier a smaller kit made of the flat items from the same production run, and let the bulky item be a domestic-only line. Everyone gets the same T-shirt and the same notebook out of the same batch; only the India roster gets the bottle. That is a defensible kit and a far better outcome than a second production run abroad in a different fabric, which is what usually happens instead.

What has to be true before the export leg can move?

The carton is rarely the problem. The consignee details are. A domestic shipment survives a half-filled address because the courier calls the number and works it out on the spot. A cross-border shipment with a thin address simply sits still, and the person chasing it is in a different time zone from the courier holding it.

So collect the recipient information as its own task, well before production finishes, and treat an incomplete row as a blocker rather than a formality. For each person on the export leg you want five things.

• Full legal name as it would appear on an identity document, not a chat handle or a first name.
• The street address written in the destination country's own format, including whatever postal code that country uses.
• A phone number in local format with the country code, which the person will actually answer during their own working day.
• An email address for the tracking link, so the first notice of a held parcel reaches them and not only you.
• A line-by-line description and quantity of what is in their carton, which is what the commercial invoice is built from.

The last one is the item teams forget. The customs paperwork is prepared at the India end, but it is prepared from a contents list that you supply, so a kit whose contents changed late needs the paperwork to change with it.

How do you get sizes right across several countries?

Apparel is where a cross-border order quietly fails, because a size letter is not a fixed quantity across markets. Someone who buys a medium at home may be a different letter in the fit you are producing, and they will answer your form with the letter they are used to rather than the one that fits your garment.

Two things help. Ask for a chest measurement, or for the size and brand of a shirt the person already owns and likes, instead of a bare letter; a measurement converts into your spec and a letter does not. And order the overseas tier with a wider size spread than the arithmetic suggests, because the recovery from a wrong size is not the same abroad. In Bengaluru a swap is a courier run across the city. In another country it is a fresh international shipment for one shirt, which nobody authorises, so the shirt goes in a drawer and the gesture is wasted.

How far ahead do you have to start?

Work backwards from the date everyone should have it, and let the slowest leg set the calendar.

1. Pick the date. If it is tied to an event, the delivery date is the day before it, not the day of it.
2. Subtract the transit. Internationally that is 5 to 10 business days depending on destination, against 2 days to an Indian metro, 3 to 4 days to a tier-2 city and 5 to 7 days to a remote pincode.
3. Subtract a buffer for a customs query at the destination. A parcel held for a question is an ordinary event, and slack in the plan is the only defence against it.
4. Subtract the production run, which is 7 to 10 days at the Bangalore facility, and which starts after artwork and sample approval rather than including them.
5. The date you are left with is the day your artwork and your recipient list have to be final.

The consequence that surprises people is the one for the domestic roster. If you want everyone to open the box in the same week, the India leg has to wait for the export leg: you dispatch abroad first and hold the local cartons back. Dispatching everything the day production ends gives the Bengaluru office its kit on Tuesday and the overseas team theirs the following week, which recreates exactly the two-tier feeling that ordering one production run was supposed to remove. For an international conference the published lead is to dispatch 7 to 10 days ahead, and a venue that will only receive goods inside a certain window is a harder constraint than any courier.

What actually goes wrong

• A consignee phone number that is missing, carries no country code, or belongs to the person who filled in the spreadsheet rather than the recipient.
• An address that turns out to be a co-working desk or a registered office with nobody named to receive the parcel.
• An employee asked for an import duty payment at the door who was never warned it might happen.
• One wrong size on the export leg, with no economical way to send a single replacement.
• A conference venue that will not accept goods before a date nobody asked about.

Who pays the duty, and how does the invoicing work?

Import duty at the destination is normally paid by the recipient. That is standard practice for corporate merchandise, and it is the single most important thing to tell overseas colleagues before the parcels move, so that a request for payment arrives expected rather than as a surprise from an unfamiliar courier.

How the order is invoiced to you, and how a cross-border shipment ought to be treated in your own books, is a question for your finance team and your auditor rather than for a merchandise supplier, and this article is deliberately not going to answer it. The merchandise page sets out how a mixed domestic and international order is invoiced.