Brilliant is a corporate gifting platform that prides itself on its sustainable practices when it comes to gifts and swag. But beyond its eco-friendly pitch, is it the right solution for your team? If you’re curious about Brilliant’s features and whether it fits your needs, this review breaks down the key points you should consider.

Brilliant Overview

Founded in 2015 by Millie Tadewaldt, Brilliant is a company that focuses on corporate gifting and branded merchandise. It aims to give its users a centralized gifting experience to boost and create personal connections. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and prides itself on its sustainable practices.

Main Features

Preferred Gift Campaigns

Under the Preferred Gift Campaigns feature, you can have your recipients pick their preferred gift or swag. Your recipient will receive an email with a link for their gift. They’ll then be redirected to a page where they need to provide their mailing address after choosing from various gift options and selecting their size and color preferences. The rest of the process will be handled by Brilliant.

Marketing event swag

The platform also offers assistance with your marketing events. For this, Brilliant can create and store your event swag, as well as ship it to your event venue. Other notable aspects of this feature are budget tools, scheduled shipments, real-time inventory tracking, order tracking, easy returns, and lack of re-stocking fees. This feature also allows you to set up a personalized e-commerce store, where your audience can pick their chosen event merch.

Creative Partner

Brilliant will provide you with a Creative Partner who will assist you in various processes and campaigns. For instance, your Creative Partner will help find the perfect swag or gift for your prospective customer or for a loyal customer of five years.

Sustainability Scorecard for Corporate Gifting

As a company that focuses on sustainability in its processes, Brilliant also has its own rating tool to measure the sustainability of its top products on a scale of 1 to 10. This scorecard is based on three core criteria: materials and process, durability and longevity, and supplier commitment. 

Pricing

In this section, we’ll discuss the prices for Brilliant’s various services. To make it easier to understand, we’ve divided them into three: 1) Preferred Gift, 2) Storefront, and 3) Integration and Automation.

Preferred Gift

Preferred Gift is Brilliant’s gift sending platform, where it collects your recipient’s preferences, such as size, color, and address information.

Its basic price is $250 for the campaign setup and an additional $50 per month per active campaign. Included in this price are a custom-branded landing page, custom-branded campaign emails, engagement dashboard, and support. 

You can also include extensive design customization, custom flows and emails, redemption prerequisites (watch a video, book a meeting, etc.), and design and feature customization. For this, you will need to request a quote from Brilliant’s team.

Storefront

Storefront is Brilliant’s version of a swag store where you can sell your merchandise and have your recipients pick their preferred item. Swag and gifts in your Brilliant Storefront can be On Demand, in bulk, or a combination of both.

Brilliant offers four subscription options for its Storefront feature.

Essential

Essential is the cheapest and most basic tier for Storefront, priced at $1,000 for a year-round access with no setup fees. Under this subscription, you will have your own custom-branded storefront and delegate access to specific teammates or your whole company. There are also flexible billing options, tracking emails, and optional delivery notices, and specified delivery in checkouts. It’s most suitable for you if your recipients reside within the US.

Pro

Pro is Storefront’s second tier, with its price at $2,500 per year for access with no setup fees, similar to Essential. It includes everything from Essential with additional features like quick sends, spend control with budgets, granular access with teams, and virtual currencies. You may now also access Brilliant’s On Demand gifting marketplace and add gift cards and promo codes under this tier. There are also approval workflows, in-box return labels, custom fields for gift sending, and a Slack integration. A full design customization is also available to you under this tier, although this comes at an additional cost.

While Pro offers international fulfillment to over 200 countries, the international warehousing and product sourcing aren’t included in this tier. This can make shipping fees and carbon emissions much higher for global shipments, despite the tier’s economy international shipping feature.

Enterprise

The next tier, Enterprise, has all features in Pro plus a storefront that the general public can access, SSO (like Okta and Azure), a custom domain name, and access to the Brilliant API. To know the price, you will need to get in touch with Brilliant’s team.

International Enterprise

International Enterprise, as the name implies, is for international sends. Under this tier, you have everything that Enterprise offers while also gaining access to Brilliant’s international warehousing and product sourcing. This is the subscription tier that is most suitable if you have international recipients. Similar to Enterprise, you’d need to contact Brilliant to know its price.

Other Storefront fees

Aside from the four pricing tiers we just discussed, Brilliant’s Storefront also has other fees: custom design, common storefront fees, and international fulfillment fees.

Custom design fees

All plans for Storefront include logo, hero area design, brand colors, and copy and virtual photos for all stocked products. However, fully custom designs are only available in the Pro and Enterprise plans and require additional fees. You’ll have to connect with Brilliant’s team for the price.

Common storefront fees

There is a 3% credit card processing fee if your Storefront accepts credit cards. An additional $2 is also for on-demand notecards.

International fulfillment fees

Brilliant offers international fulfillment in the UK, the Netherlands, India, Hong Kong, and Australia through its local fulfillment centers in said regions. The pricing for fulfillment in these facilities is $7.50 per box for pick and pack. If you have an order with more than five (5) units (across all SKUs), you need to pay $0.60 per unit for pick and pack.

Do note that you can only access international fulfillment if you’re paying for an International Enterprise Storefront. As such, the combination of packing fees and the international fulfillment storefront subscription fee can get quite expensive.

Integrations and automation fees

Brilliant also charges fees for standard integrations and automations. This already includes custom onboarding, reference documents for your team, and ongoing user success programming based on your gifting goals. Additionally, you will have custom reporting and analytics setups. You need to contact Brilliant’s sales team for pricing for this feature.

All the prices for plans under this sub-section are only available upon request, so take note!

HRIS and employee recognition integrations

If you’re focused on employee recognition and need to integrate your HRIS software with Brilliant, there are three different tiers for you to choose from.

Standard HRIS

If you avail this tier, you can integrate Brilliant with your HRIS software. This will then allow you to automate gifting for your new hires or work anniversaries with curated kits and/or gifts. You can also send designed gifts to a system address or collect addresses and preferences using Brilliant’s Preferred Gift.

Employee Recognition

Under this tier, you’ll be able to integrate Brilliant with a different employee recognition platform. You can also create Brilliant gift cards for your employees, which they can use to redeem for their choice of gifts and swag.

Custom

For the Custom plan, you can integrate with a People Teams tool that your company has and create custom workflows that based on different triggers. This means that you can automate swag and gifts for new hires, work anniversaries, birthdays, and other work milestones.

Sales and ABM integrations

If you want to leverage swag and gifts, Brilliant also has plans focused on Sales and ABM.

Salesforce Campaigns

With this tier, you’ll be able to integrate Brilliant with Salesforce so that you can automate sending a Preferred Gift campaign to your recipient using a Salesforce-based trigger. There is also a feature for you to track your sends, redemptions, and deliveries in your Salesforce campaign. Opportunity reporting, where you can match your gift cost to your ROI, is also available under this tier.

Salesforce Send Flow 

Under this plan, what you can do is to trigger gift send from a lead or contact page and establish connection with your prospects. You can also select a Preferred Gift campaign, using the send a gift flow, quick sends, or through your storefront. A native Salesforce button and Chrome extension is available for this plan as well. 

Custom

Lastly, under the Custom plan, you can integrate Brilliant with Salesforce and other ABM-related tools, if you need to. You can also create custom workflows based on various triggers, which will ultimately depend on your needs.

Marketing integrations

Brilliant can be integrated with different marketing automation tools, including Marketo and Hubspot. These integrations have their own plans and prices, so let’s review them.

Marketo

For the Marketo plan, you can, of course, integrate the software with Brilliant. Using Marketo, you can then automate sending a preferred gift campaign, as well as track sends, redemptions, and deliveries. Similar to the Salesforce Campaign, you can also tie your gift costs to your ROI.

Hubspot

The Hubspot plan is similar to the Marketo plan as it also offers the same features, such as automation for sending a preferred gift campaign, redemption, delivery tracking, and ROI monitoring. The only difference is that you’ll be using Hubspot for this plan.

Custom

There’s also a custom plan that you can use to integrate Brilliant with other marketing automation tools of your choice. For this, you can create customized workflows that depend on your chosen trigger.

Punchout catalog and invoicing (ERP) Integrations

Brilliant also has ERP integrations, which are most useful for your sales and marketing teams. If you’re to avail this plan, your employees will be able to request and approve gifting and brand marketing purchase estimates from Brilliant’s platform. Monthly statements can also be automatically generated and sent into your ERP system, streamlining invoice submissions, approvals, and payments.

Integrations available for this plan are Workday, Coupa, and other ERPs.

API and Zapier integration

The Brilliant API and Zapier integration also have a plan of their own. For this plan, you can build custom applications depending on your goals and access swag and gifts for your campaigns.

Pros and Cons

Pros

✅ Committed to sustainability: Brilliant’s sustainability scorecard and its other eco-friendly practices demonstrate its commitment to sustainable corporate gifting.

✅ Marketing event swag: Brilliant offers comprehensive assistance with marketing events, which can help you streamline your processes by removing back-and-forth with different vendors. However, Brilliant is a US-focused platform, so this might affect the fulfillment times of your event swag.

✅ Storefront for different purposes: The platform offers a storefront that you can use for different scenarios. Specifically, this feature allows you to have a storefront for events, sales and marketing, internal teams, and one accessible publicly.

Cons

❌ Only a custom lookbook of products is shown: Brilliant won’t show you its full swag and gift catalog. Rather, its team curates a selection of products based on your needs. While this can help you with picking swag and gifts for your recipients, it also limits your choices.

❌ Expensive products and fulfillment: A lot of users noted that Brilliant’s product prices are more expensive than those of its competitors, which doesn’t make it ideal if you’re on a tight budget. Plus, its US focus also makes its international fulfillment and shipping pricey.

❌ US-focused: Brilliant, despite its international fulfillment, is largely focused on the US. This means that you’re more likely to benefit from the platform’s offering if your recipients or events are within the US region.

❌ Pricing is not inclusive and not easily found: Brilliant has many other fees, such as for automation and integration, that aren’t included in the Storefront tier prices. This can be confusing, especially if you have various gifting needs. Additionally, the platform’s pricing is a bit hard to find as it’s hidden in its support center page.

❌ Global shipping is exclusive to the highest-tier plan: While Brilliant does offer international shipping and delivery duties paid (DDP), it’s only available with the International Enterprise Storefront plan. As such, if you’re not on this plan, then you won’t be able to send to your global recipients.

❌ Limited global warehousing: Brilliant has fulfillment centers in a few key regions, specifically the UK, the Netherlands, India, Hong Kong, and Australia. However, unlike platforms offering broader international coverage, Brilliant’s warehouse network is still limited, which can lead to longer delivery times and higher shipping costs for certain countries.

Brilliant is best for…

… marketing teams focused on using swag and gifts for events 👍

Brilliant’s emphasis on marketing support, including warehousing, event fulfillment, and storefronts, makes it a good choice for your marketing team. You and your team can create branded merch stores specifically for events and even automate delivery to venues, reducing logistics headaches.

… enterprises prioritizing sustainable gifting👍

If you’re an enterprise that values sustainability, may it be in practices or products, then Brilliant can be a good option. This is because of the platform’s eco-conscious efforts in ensuring that its products and services aren’t detrimental to the planet.

… leaders who want to tailor their swag stores for different audiences 👍

Brilliant’s Storefront offering allows you to customize experiences for different groups, whether it’s for your internal teams, customers, or event attendees. This makes it a strong option if you want to segment and personalize gifting efforts at scale.

Brilliant may not be a good fit for…

… companies that look for a comprehensive swag subscription model 👎

Brilliant may not be the ideal platform for you if you’re seeking a comprehensive, all-inclusive swag subscription model with predictable pricing. Its pricing structure can be especially confusing, with many fees for integrations, automations, and design customizations only available upon request. This makes it less suitable if you have a limited budget or need straightforward cost planning.

… international businesses with global recipients 👎

International businesses commonly have global recipients, and if you’re under this category, then you may encounter challenges with Brilliant. Despite the platform’s warehouses in the US, UK, Netherlands, Hong Kong, India, and Australia, international fulfillment is only available to the highest-tier plan. As such, you may encounter higher shipping costs or an overall higher price to pay for international swag and gift sends.

… organizations with tight budgets 👎

If you’re a start-up business looking for budget-friendly options, you may find Brilliant’s product and service prices higher than those of many competitors. Additionally, you will need to pay additional costs and fees if you wish to utilize the platform’s integrations and automations, which can further increase your expenses.

… teams that wish to browse and select items themselves 👎

Brilliant’s lack of an openly accessible product catalog can restrict your flexibility and choice, particularly if you prefer to browse and select from a wide range of items independently. While the curated options can help streamline decision-making for some, it can be frustrating if you want more control or need to compare items side by side. If you like to shop around or build your own kits, this curated approach may feel limiting.

Brilliant excels in providing a curated gifting experience with a strong emphasis on sustainability. Its platform offers advanced features such as customizable storefronts, campaign automation, and integration with major HR, sales, and marketing systems. However, the platform’s pricing structure is complex and often requires direct consultation for final quotes, which can be a barrier if you’re looking for transparent, all-in-one pricing. The limited visibility into the full product catalog and the higher costs compared to competitors may also be limiting. Lastly, while it offers international fulfillment, it’s only accessible at the highest subscription tier.

Looking for more affordable and all-inclusive swag solutions? Explore the best Brilliant alternatives

Brilliant may be too expensive and complex for your needs. But fret not, as there are many other corporate gifting platforms out there that you should consider. If you want cheaper options and more inclusive pricing, check out our list of Brilliant alternatives. These competitors have features and offerings that rival or even surpass Brilliant’s.

Brilliant vs PerkUp, the #1 platform for all-inclusive pricing and affordable international swag

Brilliant and PerkUp are great choices for corporate gifting, but they offer distinct features. While Brilliant is ideal for companies with extra budgets for design services and additional features, PerkUp provides a more flexible alternative with its affordable international shipping and all-inclusive pricing. We talk about this and more in our detailed comparison of Brilliant vs PerkUp. Read it and understand why companies like Product Hunt and MFCP trust PerkUp with their swag and gifting campaigns.