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Make it memorable

A couple of weeks ago, my friend gave birth to a baby daughter. A couple of hours after the delivery, my wife and I sent the happy couple a bouquet.

While on the phone with the gift shop manager, I asked if there was an item in the store that was so ugly or strange that it rarely sold. Almost instantly, she answered by describing a bizarre, creepy, headless jewelry holder that she claimed had never been purchased during her three years of employment at the shop.

“Perfect!” I said. “I’d like you to send that up as well. It will be for their daughter.”

It would have been easy to send up a teddy bear or a pair of booties, but I like to try to be memorable in everything I do. Some may find a gift like this strange or unnecessary, but when presented with the opportunity to do something different, I usually jump at the chance. Ten years from now, the teddy bear or the booties would have been all but forgotten, but an unexpected, out-of-place, downright ugly gift will surely be remembered. It will become a fixture in the story that they will one day tell their daughter about her first day of life.

I was also hoping that it would be their daughter’s first gift ever, making it almost impossible to throw away and thus increasing the probability that it would stick around for a long time.

It was.

Remarkably, it was even more bizarre than I had imagined. When I visited them earlier this week, I found the creepy-looking thing on their coffee table.

Yikes.

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