Laser Engraving Gifts

There are a ton of great laser engraving companies out there offering a lot of gifts that you can purchase, gift out or use in your home or office decor.

Today, I’d like to share with you some of the most popular items you can generally find in the marketplace and what to expect when purchasing them.

Metal Tumblers

By far one of the most popular items being sold in the laser engraving world is drinkware, mainly in the form of tumblers or metal cups. You’ll find a variety of styles, shapes, and pricing, but mostly vacuum sealed- doubled insulted types of drinkware for either hot or cold beverages.

The most popular style seems to be in the 16-24 oz range and pricing is generally in the $20-$25 range depending on the business.

A couple of things to avoid, drinkware with foam bottoms in them as many times they have screws that hold together an inner and outer layer. Sometimes you can get rust in the screws so try to avoid those if you can, otherwise, most tumblers out there will work great for your needs.

Drinking Coasters

Made of stone, marble, or even cork, coasters seem to be very popular items people like to purchase too. I myself have made many of these for businesses to resell to customers. They are fairly easy to make with lasers and usually, a laser engraving business should be able to engrave your business logo or monogram with your last name.

I tend to make a lot of these in stone, but be aware that stone isn’t always perfectly flat, so there could be some imperfections, although it does a great job of keeping moisture off your table.

You should expect a $10-$30 price point on these most times.

Keychains

Keychains can also be made with most lasers, if the business knows how to make the templates and designs. You’ll find them mostly made of wood with metal keyrings, they can range in size from 1” to 4” and come in different shapes, round, rectangle, and the like too.

They are a bit more difficult to make because of their size and purchasing a “one-off” is going to be more costly than making them in bulk.

Pricing can range from $2 to $6 each generally, I recommend sticking with basic shapes like circles if you can, they are more popular than other shapes from what I’ve produced here.

Map Plaques

Maps of where you live tend to be the best sellers, at least for my business here. You can find them made in various sizes and even layers and they can range from $20 to $300 or more, just depending on what you’d like.

The most popular by far is the smaller 8” x 10”, which I mainly offer, and people like them because they make great decor in someone's home or office.

The 12” by 16” is the next most popular size, with an average price of about $85.

I recommend that you look for them with roadmaps as they are easily identifiable compared to the topography styles maps and make sure that it’s either painted or stained.

I know some companies offer limited edition maps, meaning they will only make a select number of them and stop, something that I do with some of my maps.

Personalized Items

I also get a lot of requests for engraving things like guns, knives, or metal objects.

Something to keep in mind is that not all lasers are the same, in fact, there are 3 types of lasers out there and they all do very different things.

Diode lasers, much like the ones you see advertised on social media, are low-powered, from 2 to 10 watts generally, and are mainly used to engrave light wood, perhaps some plastics or leather.

Co2 lasers are much more high powered and can engrave and sometimes cut through things too, with wattage ranging from 10 to 120 watts. These industrial-style lasers are going to be the most common type a shop will have, they can cut and engrave just about everything, except metal.

Fiber lasers are designed to do all of the above and engrave metal too, although they are the most expensive to purchase and roughly 36% of engraving shops are going to have something like this.

A few other things I get requests for are engraving tile, brick, and sometimes glass depending on the job.

You will find that most laser engraving shops will take on your custom work and those that can’t tell you so, either because they don’t have the right equipment or they don’t have the time to do it.

Custom work is also going to be much more costly to produce, so I recommend that if you have something custom you want to make, try to make it in bulk, like Christmas ornaments.