Onboarding kits that made day one feel real
Our client is a mid-market SaaS company that went from a single office to fully remote in under a year. HR still had onboarding logistics built for people walking into one building — new hires now spread across 12 cities got a laptop shipped separately, an email, and a Slack invite. It worked, but nothing about day one felt considered.
The brief
The People team wanted new hires to feel like someone had thought about their first day specifically — without turning HR into a shipping department. It had to work across engineering, sales, and G&A roles, across time zones, and it had to survive contact with a real HR calendar where start dates move.
What we built
We designed three kit tiers sharing a common core — a branded notebook, an insulated mug, and a welcome card with a handwritten line from the new hire's manager — plus one role-specific item: a wrist rest and cable kit for engineering, a portable charger for sales roles that travel, a curated stationery set for G&A. Kits were assembled at our Toronto facility and a secondary U.S. 3PL, and scheduled against the client's offer-acceptance data so each kit landed the business day before the person's actual start date, not a generic "week of" window.
Results
Over one quarter, we shipped 1,200 kits across the 12 cities with a 97% on-time (day-before-start) delivery rate. In the company's existing 30-day new-hire pulse survey, the kit was mentioned unprompted by 41% of respondents as a highlight of their first week — the highest of any onboarding touchpoint that quarter, ahead of the manager 1:1 and the team intro call. Per-kit cost landed between $62 and $88 depending on tier, in line with what the client had already been budgeting for generic swag.
Why it worked
Nothing here was expensive or exotic. The lift came from timing and specificity — a kit that shows up the day before you start, addressed to you, with one item that matches your actual job, reads as effort in a way a bigger but generic box doesn't.