A few weeks ago we published a post about where your money goes when you buy a gift box. It traced the dollar from your purchase through to our producers, our packaging partners, our team, and the charities we support.
That post told one side of the story. This one tells the other.
Because the impact of your purchase doesn’t stop when the money lands in a producer’s account. It keeps moving. And the further you follow it, the more interesting it gets.
One gift box, traced outward
Let’s take a real example. Say you send someone our Wild About Wellington gift box. Inside, there are products from 12 different Wellington producers.
That’s 12 small businesses receiving an order from your single purchase. Each of those producers has their own suppliers: the Pacific farmer who grows the cocoa beans, the printer who makes the labels, the freight company that delivers their ingredients. Each of those producers has staff who spend their wages locally — at the supermarket, at the petrol station, at their kids’ school fundraiser.
Economists call this the local multiplier effect. Money spent with a local business recirculates in the community at a significantly higher rate than money spent with a large chain or an overseas retailer. Research from Civic Economics local multiplier studies found that, on average, about 48% of spending at local independent businesses was recirculated locally, compared with less than 14% at chain stores.
We’re not economists. We’re gift box people. But the maths matters, because it shows that buying local does something real.
Scale it up and the numbers get loud
One gift box supports 12 producers. That’s meaningful on its own.
Now think about a corporate order. A company sends 50 gift boxes to their clients at the end of the financial year. That’s 600 individual producer orders. If they mix regional boxes, that money reaches communities across the country, supporting businesses that employ real people in real towns across Aotearoa.
We’ve done the rough maths on our own numbers. Since 2018, We Love Local has returned close to $4 million to small Kiwi producers. That money didn’t sit still. It paid wages. It bought ingredients from other local suppliers. It funded equipment upgrades that let producers hire another person or take on bigger orders.
One of our producers told us during Covid that our consistent orders were what kept the lights on and production running. That’s the multiplier at work. Your gift kept someone employed during a challenging time.
It works differently from imported gifts
Here’s where the comparison gets stark. When you buy a mass-produced gift hamper filled with imported products, most of that money leaves the country. The manufacturers are overseas. The ingredients were sourced overseas. The packaging was printed overseas. The only local spend is the courier fee to get it to the recipient’s door.
When you buy a We Love Local gift box, the supply chain stays here. The products are made here. The packaging is made here. The team packing your gift lives here. Even the charities we donate to operate here.
That’s not a marketing claim. It’s just how the money flows. And it means your purchase has a fundamentally different shape than the cheaper alternative.
The compounding effect of repeat orders
The multiplier effect gets stronger over time. When a corporate client places regular orders with us, their producers can plan ahead. A chocolate maker who knows they’ll get consistent orders from us can commit to a new flavour. A honey producer can invest in more hives. A small condiment maker can finally move from their home kitchen to a commercial space.
We’ve seen this happen with several of our producers over the years. Businesses that started as market stall operations have grown into proper commercial enterprises, partly because they had reliable wholesale orders coming through us. That growth creates jobs, generates tax revenue, and strengthens the community those businesses operate in.
Your repeat order is a signal to a small producer that someone believes in what they’re making. That confidence compounds over time in ways that are hard to quantify and impossible to ignore.
What this means if you’re choosing corporate gifts
If you’re the person selecting gifts for your company, the multiplier effect gives you something concrete to put in front of your manager.
A We Love Local gift box generates measurable local economic impact that your company can talk about in its sustainability reporting, its community engagement strategy, and its internal comms. We can provide the specifics: how many producers your order supported, which regions, what the combined local impact looks like.
That’s a very different story from “we sent everyone a branded pen.”
The ripple keeps going
We started We Love Local in 2018 because we believed in the power of buying local. Several years later, we’ve sent tens of thousands of gift boxes and worked with over 200 producers. The ripple from those purchases has reached communities across the country in ways we couldn’t have predicted when we were delivering gift boxes from the back of our electric car on the Kāpiti Coast.
Every time you choose to send a We Love Local gift, you multiply that impact a little further. One purchase. Multiple producers. Their staff. Their suppliers. Their communities.
That’s the multiplier effect. And it starts with your next gift.
