We are set to launch this year’s Gift of the Year competition an we have some excited surprises for you...the first one being that this year competition will feature a brand-new website, which will allow you to enter your amazing products easier and gain more visibility from the judges. The new website will allow for more imagery, video and back links to your website to give the judges a more complete view of your business.  The user experience of the entrants and the judges has been thought about to make the process much smoother but also give the maximum exposure for your entries

The new website will also celebrate the winners in more style allowing better promotion of  winning products and more ways for buyers and retailers to find the winning products, and hopefully in the future we still have a few more surprises up the sleeves for those well-deserved winners to allows buyers even more access to the shortlisted products and businesses.

This year’s competition also features a few new categories to move with the times and get entries from across the whole of our industry. New categories we have added are:

MY GIFT OF ALL TIME - This category will focus on your halo products your gifts that have contined to perform well and have outperformed all others. These products do not have to be new for the coming year they just need to be your most succesful of all time, we are hoping to see a few past entrants into this category.

OWN LABEL - For those companies that product goods for department stores and multiples, you may not have gotten the chance to enter into a competition before if your products are fully white labelled. This will be your chance to let your products shine amongst other suppliers in the industry.

INTERNATIONAL -  This category for anyone who has success with their products overseas. It doesn't have to be monetary success of sales, it just needs to be a successful product for your business in an area that isn't the UK.

TECH AND GADGETS - This category has been in the making for years and has been asked about from some of our previous contestants, now we have the systems to collect more entries we are hoping this category will include more tech related gifts covering all the categories as well as gadgets

There have also been some changes to other categories too, which you can read about below

Childrens, Educational and Pre-School – incorporating educational and preschool

Commemorative, collectable and charitable – Evolving from our Gifts of Hope awards, we will now be accepting entries into this category that have given to charity or other good causes

Fashion Accessories- now incorporating fashion jewellery

Garden and Home – incorporating garden gifts into the home category

Under £15 - reflecting the current climate with not many gift being under £10.

The new website, will be open very soon, but if you would like to be added to mailing list then please do so here or if you would like to start your entry early then please get in touch with chris.workman@ga-uk.org

..more dates to follow