Baby basket birthday first gift

Gift bags are in everyone's clutches

By MARY MCNAMARA Los Angeles Times

Monday, December 22, 2003

Hollywood -- In an office above a Los Angeles strip mall, the floor is covered with swag. Tumi luggage, Armani cologne, stacks of Sebastian Trucco makeup, Cricket Cola cases, piles of wee baby T- shirts and CD cases, baskets full of hair care products, towers of Altoid tins and Balance bars and coffee mugs and surfboard wax.

This is the newly opened West Coast office of the New York-based Buzz Bags, and items covering the floor are mostly remnants of their latest big project: gift bags for the Women's Tennis Association Championship Finals. Participants received, among most of the items mentioned above, a $2,500 gift certificate for laser hair removal by a top Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeon.

"They went berserk," says Debbie Flesch, who along with Sandy Reed runs the L.A. office. "(Winner) Kim Clijsters took one look at the bag, and I thought she was going to cry. The woman had just won a million dollars and a Porsche, and she was just delirious over our bag. It's crazy, but it happens all the time."

"All the time" is not an overstatement. Long, long ago, gift bags were the accoutrement of two arenas: high-priced charity dinners (at which attendees might receive a Barneys key chain or a silver-plate picture frame as a thank-you) and media events -- magazine launches, record releases, movie premieres that ended with the ubiquitous paper sack full of the ubiquitous T-shirt, CD and, if you were lucky, Godiva chocolate samples.

Gift bags de rigueur now

Now gift bags are a standard part of every high-end event, from the Oscars to the U.S. Open, from the Carousel of Hope Ball to private dinner parties. A list of Emmy or Grammy nominees is followed moments later by a rundown of the contents of the gift bags to be collected by the awards presenters. Celebrities call party planners in advance to find out what's in the gift bag, and social doyennes regularly help themselves to two or three "for my friends in the car."

People who once began an evening wondering who they would leave with spend the party in delicious anticipation of what they will leave with.

Gift bags have grown in girth as well as number, and so has the spillover -- tennis players receiving thousands of dollars worth of non-sports-related items is just the beginning. No longer a glittery, gushing star-schmooze, gift bags in the past few years have become a strategic marketing tool.

Companies vie for the opportunity to donate products -- and usually pay a fee to be included in the bag -- because it is cost- effective advertising. And if this trend follows the standard celebrity trickle-down patterns, gift bags will be soon be as standard a staple at Debbie's graduation party as Chardonnay and baked Brie.

"Gift bags are about generating word of mouth," says Scott Donaton, the editor of Advertising Age. "And word of mouth is the latest, biggest trend in advertising. It's just exploding."

Generating buzz

In making his own social rounds in New York, Donaton has been handed parting gifts at fashion shows, book signings and private dinner parties. Part of this, he says, is the result of a general blurring of social and business activity -- increasingly, people are padding their guest lists with high-profile types and then persuading companies to underwrite the festivities. Gift bags, he says, are the purest vehicle for generating buzz in a consumer audience that has become increasingly fragmented and distrustful of advertising itself.

"If you can put your product into the hands of people who get the word out, that's implied endorsement," Donaton says. "It means more if a friend tells you something is good than if an ad tells you."

Your budget might not cover a celebrity spokesperson, he adds, "but if you have a celebrity photographed with your phone or your watch, that's even better because people won't think you paid for it."

But "celebrity" is slowly being replaced by "trendsetter." With six years in the gift-bag industry, Dennis Lumpkin -- an event producer for Sequoia Productions, which puts together the Governors Ball at the Oscars -- may well be the person most responsible for the gift-bagging of America.

Bagging the celebs

In the mid-'90s, Oscar gift baskets were put together to get presenters to attend the rehearsals. It was Lumpkin who suggested that the Emmys follow suit. He still works both gigs, but his last project was a basket for Michael Jordan's basketball camp. It was attended by the rich and unfamous, but Lumpkin had no problem getting plenty of high-end free stuff.

"Now we're seeing people who don't want to give to celebrities," Lumpkin says. "They figure celebrities get too much stuff. So instead they want to target corporate types. That way, the products stand out more."

It's no wonder that in the past few years, an industry of gift bag creators, such as Buzz Bags, has popped up like so many Santa's elves.

When Lash Fary and his partner started Distinctive Assets four years ago, they were the only game in town. The only gift bags worth talking about were the Oscars', which were done in-house. Now, he says, he hears about new companies all the time, and the near- ubiquitousness of gift bags adds a note of tension to his job.

"So many new companies up the ante," he says, which creates a nearly insatiable media appetite for gift lists. "The press just freaks out about it each year -- what's the value, what's the wow -- so it has to keep getting higher to keep them interested. And now you have people who want gift bags for weddings, bar mitzvahs, baby showers, Super Bowl parties."

Gift bags, Fary says, make people feel as though they are, if not celebrities, then at least part of the inner circle. A circle that is ever widening.

Firms line up to donate

Buzz Bags began when its founders decided to put gift bags on the jitney that runs from New York City to the Hamptons -- getting to a social elite that might never see a red carpet. Since then, they have bagged Donald Trump's private box seats at the U.S. Open; Meryl Streep's birthday party; the opening of Rosie O'Donnell's Broadway show, "Taboo"; as well as working with the Ellen DeGeneres show.

Four or five years ago, most luxury goods manufacturers had never heard of gift bags. "When I started calling around," Fary says, "people just laughed. Give stuff to celebrities? And pay a fee to do it?"

Now Fary can barely walk through his office, there is so much loot sent with desperate pleas for his approval.

"Budgets are developed with gift bags in mind," says Marie Griffin, who, through her New York company Griffin Marketing & P.R., represents clients including Clark Shoes and Hello Kitty. She says she encourages all her clients to participate in gifting opportunities because "it's an integral part of advertising on every level."

Why? She offers this example: At last year's Nickelodeon's Kids Choice Awards, Griffin says, Cameron Diaz was wearing a Hello Kitty necklace when she was photographed for the first time with current beau Justin Timberlake.

"Now that is the picture that everyone uses when they write about their relationship," Griffin says. "You cannot put a price on that kind of exposure."

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