Brands Are Entering the Busiest Season of the Year. But the Real Impact Starts in January. 🎄

Brands are now entering one of the busiest and most important periods of the year: Christmas gifting.

Media plans are locked. Campaigns are live. Stores are full.The entire machine is optimised for one thing: selling as much as possible before December 24.

But if you zoom out from Q4 numbers and look at what happens next, the picture gets more complicated, for margin, for brand integrity, and for sustainability.

Because Christmas isn’t just a peak for sales.It’s also a peak for returns, fraud, counterfeits and waste.

The Part of Christmas Nobody Puts in the TV Ads

Across markets, holiday returns are consistently higher than the rest of the year.In the U.S. alone:

• Roughly 15% of purchases made during the holiday season are returned.

• Returns can add 30% or more to the emissions of the original delivery, and contribute millions of tons of CO₂ and waste every year.

• Billions in product value end up written down, destroyed or stuck in reverse logistics loops instead of going back into controlled channels.

And then there’s fraud. Returns platforms and retailers are already flagging counterfeit returns as a “silent crisis” of peak season, hitting high-ticket categories like luxury fashion, jewellery and accessories hardest.

The same dynamics that make Christmas good for sales, high volume, speed, pressure, also make it the best time of year for bad actors.

The Industry’s Blind Spot: What Happens to the Gift Next?

From an industry point of view, the Christmas surge is not just about how much we sell. It’s about what happens to those items over the next 6–24 months:

• How many come back as returns in January?

• How many re‑enter the market as uncontrolled resale or grey market stock?

• How many get destroyed or dumped, even though customers and regulators increasingly expect circularity?

Most brands don’t have a precise answer, because most individual units are still anonymous.

Once the gift leaves the store or warehouse, the brand’s view becomes a blur of:

• Aggregated returns data

• Marketplace screenshots

• Occasional anecdotes about counterfeits and grey‑market behaviour

In other words:Brands push hard to win the gifting moment, then quietly lose control of the post‑gift lifetime.

When a Gift Has No Identity, Everyone Else Sets the Rules

A Christmas gift without a strong product identity is easy to love for one season, and easy to lose control of afterwards.

It’s easier for:

• Counterfeit items to be swapped in during returns

• High‑ticket goods to slide into grey channels at a discount

• Genuine items to resurface online in ways that erode price integrity and brand perception

And from a sustainability standpoint, anonymity is costly:

• Returns and reverse logistics add significant emissions and packaging waste.

• Items that are hard to authenticate, route or recondition are far more likely to be written off or destroyed.

If the item carries no live, verifiable identity, then:

• Returns teams are forced to make fast decisions with incomplete information.

• Marketplaces become the default infrastructure for second life.

• Sustainability claims sit on top of a system that still quietly leaks value and waste.

What a 2025-Ready Gift Looks Like

A 2025‑ready premium gift doesn’t just look desirable under the tree. It’s designed so that its future is programmable.

Concretely, that means:

1. Identity Built In

Each unit carries a digital identity that says: “This is who I am, this is where I’ve been, and this is what I’m allowed to do next.”

That identity survives returns, ownership changes and resale.

2. Authenticity and Provenance as Default

From day one, the gift has:

• Verifiable authenticity

• A starting provenance log (first purchase event, channel, date)

That makes counterfeit swaps in January much harder, and trusted resale later much easier.

3. Service That Follows the Item

Warranty and repair options don’t die with the original buyer.

They move with the product identity, so a second owner can still:

• Register the item

• Book repairs

• Access care instructions

Suddenly, “pre‑owned” starts to feel premium, not “as‑is”.

4. Value That’s Legible, Not Guesswork

The brand can (even discreetly) signal how the item is meant to live over time:

• Expected lifespan / repairability

• Whether it’s eligible for brand‑owned resale or buy‑back

• Price‑floor logic for controlled channels

You don’t have to print “resale” on the swing tag for customers to sense that this gift is future‑proofed, not disposable.

Brands Are Optimising December. The Leaders Are Designing January.

In the next 6 weeks, the industry will talk about:

• Black Friday, Cyber Week, Christmas

• Conversion, footfall, sell‑through

• “Successful peak”

But the brands that will look strongest by next Christmas are quietly working on a different brief:

• Fewer anonymous gifts

• Fewer unverifiable returns

• Fewer uncontrolled second lives

More:

• Items with identity

• Returns that become clean, authenticated supply

• Second and third owners who stay inside a brand ecosystem, not just a marketplace one

Because in 2025, a premium Christmas gift is no longer just:“Will they love it on the 25th?”

It’s also:“Will they be able to trust it, service it and eventually move it, on our terms, not someone else’s?”

That’s where digital identity, routing and brand‑owned resale stop being “nice to have circularity projects” and start becoming a core part of the Christmas P&L.