In business, the holidays provide a great opportunity to connect and show appreciation to clients and vendors with personal style. The challenge is coming up with unique and creative ways to stand out from a sea of cards and gifts. To help strengthen relationships with his portfolio of clients, Benny Yip, owner and creative director of Toronto-based company Velvet, created a personalized holiday gift basket. Seeking to include a practical, gift item for his clients that would be reusable and also represent the creative style of Velvet, Yip specially designed a customized set of eye-catching beverage coasters to compliment his premium gift basket of holiday essentials. To ensure the holiday coasters could resist constant handling while maintaining stylized aesthetics, Yip chose to create them using YUPO® 144lb Cover synthetic paper, an innovative product from Yupo Corporation America (Chesapeake, VA).

Blending Art and Design
Making personal connections is at the heart of Yip’s business strategy for Velvet, the cutting-edge graphic design company that he founded in 2006. Velvet’s clients are high-profile companies in the fashion, music and food and beverage industries. Maintaining top-level, personalized client communications is especially important for the future of Velvet’s business.

To show his appreciation and acknowledge the festive winter season, Yip wanted to add a unique element to the recent client holiday gift basket that would be both useful for recipients and reflect Velvet’s aesthetic focus on blending art with design. To meet this need, Yip conceptualized a graphical set of drink coasters that would serve as a high-impact alternative to a traditional holiday card.

Consisting of four custom designs based on thematic holiday imagery – a holiday flower, a snowflake, celebratory fireworks and a heart – the coasters blend image layers to add depth and dimension for a more complex, artistic look.

“I wanted the coasters to be an alluring, abstract and modern interpretation of holiday greetings. They are the only customized items within the client gift baskets, so they had to reinforce Velvet’s design position,” explains Yip.

To keep the coasters intact within the gift basket, each four-coaster set is packaged in a metal CD case featuring a Velvet-customized silkscreen holiday design on the front lid.

Making Art Tangible
After researching a number of material options for fabricating the drink coasters, Yip decided that YUPO synthetic paper held the best combination of properties to meet the project requirements. Tear- and stain-resistant and 100 percent waterproof, YUPO provides the coasters with long-lasting durability.

“I wanted the coasters to be something that clients could keep and cherish, rather than throw away when they are done with the rest of the gift basket contents. As a result, it was essential that the coasters be able to stand up to constant exposure to moisture from beverages, as well as frequent handling,” comments Yip. “Laminated paper did not offer the aesthetic look that I wanted and was too slippery to work well as a coaster application. YUPO was a great alternative.”

YUPO also offers exceptional color and graphic reproduction, a vital advantage to capture the complexity of Yip’s coaster designs. “YUPO really brings the true depth, intricacy and holiday energy of each coaster to life,” adds Yip.

Happy Holiday Results
The gift baskets were originally hand delivered to the existing clients, and the coasters were so popular that recipients wanted to pass them along to other colleagues and friends. What began as a unique gift idea to visually connect with its audience blossomed into a successful self-promotion piece and helped Velvet expand its exposure at key client companies.

“The coaster sets have been a huge success with Velvet’s clients,” says Yip. ”It’s a great compliment and achievement to have our clients referring us and using this product for their own gift ideas.”