What to Send an Employee After a Death in the Family

Someone on your team has had a death in the family. You usually hear it second-hand and a few days late, from a colleague rather than from them, and then you are standing in front of a set of questions nobody wants to be researching in the moment: whether to send anything at all, to which address, in whose name, out of whose budget.

In a lot of companies it stalls right there for a week, and then quietly does not happen. This is a guide to not letting that be the outcome — written from the practical side, because the practical side is what actually blocks it.

First, the honest limits of what a gift does

A box does not help with grief. It is not a substitute for bereavement leave, for flexibility on deadlines when they come back, for cover on their accounts while they are gone, or for a manager picking up the phone. If your company is weighing a gift instead of those things, send none of it and fix the other thing first.

What sending something considered does do is narrower and still worth doing: it tells someone that the place they work noticed, without asking them to reply, perform gratitude, or manage anyone else's feelings about it. That is the whole claim. Anything more than that is marketing, and grief is a poor place for marketing.

The decisions that actually stall it

Who signs it. The default that works is the person's direct manager plus the team they sit with — not "the company", not the CEO who has never met them. A note signed by an abstraction reads as a form letter.

Which address. This is the question that kills more sends than any other. You often do not have a home address you are permitted to use, and asking for one through two intermediaries during that week is intrusive. If your HR system holds a home address for payroll or benefits purposes, check with whoever owns that data whether it can be used here. If it cannot, ask the person's manager to ask them directly and simply — most people answer a direct, brief question far more easily than a routed one.

Whose budget. Bereavement sits in nobody's plan, so each one becomes a small approval conversation that costs more attention than the gift. This is the single strongest argument for deciding it once, at the policy level, rather than case by case.

When. There is no window you have missed. Something that arrives a fortnight later, when the house has emptied out and the casseroles have stopped, is often better received than something in the first forty-eight hours.

What to send, and what to leave out

Nothing branded. A logo on a box arriving at a house after a death is the company talking about itself. Keep the packaging plain. This is the one occasion where your brand should be entirely absent from the object and present only in the fact that you sent it.

Go light on food. A grieving household frequently has more food than it can use — this is what everyone sends. Wellness and home items tend to be the steadier build: something warm, something quiet, things that get used weeks later when the attention has moved on. If you do include food, favour things that keep.

No alcohol. You do not know what is happening in that house. Our alcohol-free boxes are labelled as such, and this is the occasion to use them.

The note card matters more than the contents. Short is fine. Name the person who died if you know the name. Do not write "everything happens for a reason", do not promise that it gets easier, and do not ask for a reply. "We are thinking of you, and there is nothing you need to do about this" is a complete note.

Write the policy before you need it

Every problem above is easier when it was decided in advance, in the calm, by someone who was not also processing the news. A workable bereavement gifting policy fits in a paragraph:

• Trigger: who tells whom, and how the decision gets started without waiting for a manager to think of it.
• Scope: which relationships are covered — immediate family, extended, partners, and, if you want to be genuinely humane about it, pets.
• Standard send: one unbranded box, decided once, so nobody is choosing under pressure.
• Address handling: who is permitted to look one up and who asks if not.
• Budget: a line that already exists, so no one is seeking approval that week.
• Consistency: the same response regardless of seniority. This one matters more than any of the others.

That last point deserves its own sentence. The difference people notice is not what was sent — it is that a director's loss was marked and a warehouse supervisor's was not, because one had a manager who thought of it and the other did not. Consistency is the entire reason to write this down.

How we handle it

We keep these unbranded, weight them toward wellness and home items rather than food, label the alcohol-free options clearly, and put your words on the note card rather than ours. Non-branded boxes are packed within 72 hours of the order being confirmed and arrive one to five business days after packing on tracked ground. There is no paid rush lane and no overnight option — nothing ordered today lands tomorrow, and as above, that is genuinely fine.

If you would rather this were already decided, the Annual Corporate Gifting Program reserves the year's gifts up front, so the bereavement send is a message to us rather than a sourcing project during someone's worst week. The programme starts at 100 gifts for the year across all your occasions; below that a straight order works the same way, without the annual commitment.

The full set of moments companies have to handle — new hires, leave, illness, milestones, December — is on our gift occasions page, with what each one needs and how long it takes.

Frequently asked

Should a company send a gift when an employee's parent dies?
Yes, if you can do it consistently. The thing that causes harm is not sending something imperfect — it is marking one person's loss and not another's.

What should a company send instead of food?
Wellness and home items travel better into a grieving household, which usually already has more food than it can use. Keep it unbranded and keep it quiet.

Is it too late to send something two weeks later?
No. Later is often better. The first week is crowded and the fourth is empty.

Should the CEO sign it?
Only if the CEO knows them. Otherwise the manager and the immediate team, which reads as real rather than procedural.