“Gift guide for the coolest girl you know.” “Gift guide for the niche luxury chic girl.” “Gift guide for the guy that has everything.” “Gift guide for your whimsical friend.” “The only gift guide you’ll ever need.” By now, your TikTok FYP has probably been flooded by gift recommendations, and that’s before heading to Instagram to see what retailers and publishers are suggesting, or your inbox to read the guides authored by your favourite Substackers.
Gift guides have long been a holiday season staple, but as short-form social content continues its reign, they’re ballooning far beyond traditional media. Algorithms increasingly shape how people shop — serving hyper-specific micro-personas and niche lifestyle archetypes — and gifting content has followed suit. The act of choosing a gift has been reinterpreted as a commodified personality-matching exercise. In creator marketing company Fohr’s recent survey of over 500 creators, 93% said they plan to put together a gift guide this year.
When I asked people on Instagram about their perceptions of gift guides, responses were mixed. Some said they love these guides and often find ideas they haven’t seen elsewhere. Others were more skeptical. “Gift guides are too much and often too commercial,” student Sarah Arsalan tells me. “I tend to look at them and play ‘spot the advert’ that warranted or forced them to do the gift guide in the first place,” adds consultant and content creator Scott Staniland.
While Substack is a growing platform for gifting advice, it has also provided an outlet for skepticism. In September, “Shop Rat” Substack author Emilia Petrarca hosted a shopping summit that included a session titled “Have we reached peak gift guide?”. Rachel Tashjian, who writes invite-only newsletter “Opulent Tips”, quipped in a Substack post: “So many gift guides, so few gifts given!” Meanwhile, Emily Sundberg, author of “Feed Me”, wrote: “How many hours of your one precious holiday season per year do you want to spend pattern-matching objects to people in your life?”
This backlash is unfolding against a backdrop of weakened consumer confidence. In the US, sentiment is down almost 30% year-on-year, nearing the lowest level on record, according to a survey from the University of Michigan. There’s a risk of overwhelming the consumer with product-heavy content, especially as their wallets tighten.
Brand and communications consultant Chinazo Ufodiama says that at the luxury end, gift guides are “among the most competitive yet least effective forms of product placement”, and tend to bring more value in terms of visibility than conversion. “Having successfully placed products at varying price points within Christmas gift guides, it’s actually quite rare for these placements to generate commercial returns, particularly when compared with everyday trend or style-led product stories,” she says. “Gift guides often fall on the side of generic, feeling more like an SEO play.”
Experts say the winners will be those who stand out with the human touch, offering specificity and emotional connection.
How to get it right
Niche and emotive gifting is what the consumers I spoke to are looking for. “I feel like I need super specific gift guides, like ‘What to get for your friend of two years who’s into fashion and art that’s not useless and actually will be used by them,’” jokes Arsalan. She adds that she’s more likely to trust a gift guide if the person who is making the recommendation — via TikTok, a newsletter or otherwise — has expertise or interest in the gift category they’re recommending.
This element of trusted curation is essential. While the overall ecosystem is becoming oversaturated, the guides that perform are the ones anchored in personality. “Shoppers aren’t browsing for gifts the way they used to. They’re starting their searches with the people whose taste they already trust, and those creators will continue to become more niche and trusted,” says Tiffany Lopinsky, co-founder and president of affiliate and influencer marketing platform ShopMy. “Instead of wading through endless lists, they’re relying on creators, editors and stylists who feel like an extension of their inner circle, and are doing that earlier and more often than we’ve seen in the past.”
Despite some of the fatigue, ShopMy’s data suggests that gross merchandise value (GMV) from gift guides is up 90% compared to last year, aided by strong connections between the creator and their audience, as well as better feedback loops. “Because curators are starting earlier, their audiences are actively informing their gift guides for the rest of the season, so I anticipate we’ll see more of this dynamic emerge, almost like having a personal shopper,” says Lopinsky. “We’ve seen brands spending more, pulling budgets from other marketing spend and starting earlier, so the connection between brands and creators is working better than ever.”
Online shopping platform Collagerie says it tends to see a 60% uplift in sales during the Q4 gifting period versus Q3. Its approach to gifting content spans “the unusual, the beautiful, the meaningful and the necessary, and this is across all price-points”, says co-founder Serena Hood, who co-founded the company with fellow former British Vogue editor Lucinda Chambers in 2019. Collagerie’s gift guides are tightly edited, prioritizing curation over volume, and relying on the founders’ editorial eye and taste-led recommendations. “Trust and authenticity is reflected front and foremost throughout our gift guides,” says Hood.
With more consumers looking to ChatGPT for quick gift suggestions, sorted by budget, personality type or aesthetic, gift guides need to come with a sense of intimacy. The task for curators is to convince readers not to outsource gifting to AI, by signaling the value of a human-led guide informed by taste, culture, discernment and emotional connection. As consumers grow increasingly skeptical of generic roundups, they’re also looking for transparency around value: products that a curator has actually tried, owns or genuinely recommends, rather than a list of affiliate-friendly products.
During times of softer consumer sentiment, Victoire Tardy-Joubert, founder of gifting marketplace The Go-To, has seen personalized gifts perform particularly well, as they offer something unique without breaking the bank. The Go-To offers advanced filtering tools, as well as a bespoke gifting concierge. “[With the gift concierge], we basically put together a gift guide for an individual person — it’s a visual edit of what that you could get for them,” says Tardy-Joubert, who founded the company in 2022 after gaining a reputation at luxury retailer Matches, where she worked in customer relations, for creating a spreadsheet of unique gifts passed between employees.
New platform A List, which is still in beta mode, was born from founder Aida Vrazalica’s gifting frustrations. “What people keep telling me is: ‘I don’t need more recommendations, I need clarity on what I actually want and what my peers want,’” says Vrazalica. A List allows users to create gift wish lists and registries. “Instead of being told what to want, users identify their own aesthetics, needs and long-term desires, creating a personal, intentional and sustainable guide for gifting, shopping and everyday decision-making. It removes the emotional labor of gift-finding and the guesswork of gifting.”
There are opportunities for the scope of gift guides to expand. In the luxury market, there’s been a shift toward consumers preferring to spend money on experiences over products. With that in mind, creators could explore opportunities to share gift guides that include dining experiences, workshops, concert tickets or personalized services. With sustainability concerns rising and consumers increasingly wary of overconsumption, a pivot to experiential gifting could resonate with these values. Gifting recommendations could broaden to clothing customization or repair workshops, or brands could tap in by presenting experiential gifting opportunities for creators or publishers to include in gift guides, in conjunction with typical product placements.
We may have reached peak gift guide, but it’s not the end of the format. The next phase will be defined by curation, trust and emotion — standing out as unmistakably human in a sea of algorithmic recommendations.
