Gwyneth Paltrow has one. So do Amanda Seyfried and the Kardashians. Magazines like New York, GQ and Vogue publish several. The boutique down the street just released one, as did seemingly every lifestyle writer on Substack — even the ones who said they really didn’t want to. The New York Times has a couple, too.
Each holiday season, the pressure of finding the perfect gift for someone can seem as overwhelming as the number of gift guides trying to offer solutions. And now, some people are expressing their fatigue with the deluge of gift guides from influencers, media outlets and individuals that clog email inboxes and dominate social media feeds.
The gift guide ecosystem — or “industrial complex” as one X user called it — used to be dominated by stores like Sears and Williams-Sonoma, which mailed out bulky catalogs to entice holiday shoppers. Some of those compendiums could be amusingly aspirational.
“I remember seeing a chicken coop one year and wondering who the hell was buying this stuff,” said Drew Magary, who writes an annual “Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog,” which ridicules some of the retailer’s more lavish gifts.
Media companies entered the fray more than a decade ago. But the lure of affiliate marketing dollars, which gave them a cut of whatever people bought via hyperlink, has led many to only increase their production of gift guides.
Emilia Petrarca, a fashion writer based in Brooklyn, argues that the gift guide glut began with the larger media companies. “People wanted genuine and useful recommendations, but so much of what you would see were Amazon links and expensive advertiser placements,” she said.
Over the last few years, gift guides from individual writers and influencers like Ms. Petrarca, who writes the Shop Rat newsletter on Substack, have served as the indie counterpoint (though many also use affiliate links).
A spokeswoman for Substack said the platform’s users created thousands of guides every year, ranging from general roundups to deep niches, like those for motor sport enthusiasts or “esoteric boyfriends.” There are even anti-gift gift guides, which list potential presents with a sprinkling of anti-consumerist messaging.
“These recommendations are now personal — they’re signaling the taste of the individual making it,” said Daisy Alioto, the founder of the media company Dirt.
The recent glut of gift guides, she said, is part of an “unbundling” moment in media, as writers leave larger organizations to become independent and start searching for revenue streams. “These guides aren’t an editorial statement about the taste of, say, Vogue or even Neiman Marcus anymore,” Ms. Alioto said.
This year, Ms. Petrarca, who worked on gift guides when she was on staff at New York magazine, included items like playful Christmas ornaments, Sicilian olive oil and bed linens from the Peruvian brand Mozhdeh Matin in her guide.
But before she released it, she wrote a post explaining how Substack publishers like her may receive a percentage of the money readers spend on the gifts they suggest — a phenomenon she says has helped lead to an excess of gift guides that are shuffled off without much thought.
“Now the fatigue is coming from the fact that everyone is writing them,” said Ms. Petrarca, 32. “I still enjoy reading the ones that people put care and thought into.”
Complaining about gift guides, however, may be its own time-honored tradition.
“It’s about being repulsed by the price of things or the crassness of the recommendations,” said Kaitlin Phillips, a publicist and longtime gift guide author.
Up until recently, Ms. Phillips took a decidedly lo-fi approach to her guides, publishing them in Google Docs and sharing them on her social media accounts. She combined her own suggestions with recommendations solicited from her network of tastemakers, including the likes of Ina Garten and Alison Roman. This season, she moved her list to Substack and claimed a covetable domain name: Gift Guide.
But despite being known for her own gift guides, Ms. Phillips, 34, said she never shops from them. “I see gift guides as reading experiences, not shopping destinations,” she said. “They should have an element of surprise and mystery, just like good gifts.”
One year, the writer Polly Samson recommended a rare horse breed, and Ms. Phillips included it in her annual list. “I got a lot of fun emails after that,” she said.
Horses and hen houses aren’t the only opulent gifts that appear on many guides, though. New York magazine’s Strategist section included a $4,500 coffee pot and a $2,100 lamp in its guide this year, and shoppers can buy a $3,900 apartment-friendly infrared sauna or a $4,300 Pilates reformer directly from Goop’s.
“Sometimes it feels like you’re in a gift guide looking for ideas, but you end up feeling like a poor guy,” Mr. Magary said, though he used an expletive instead.
Some view gift guides as just the tip of the iceberg in a larger consumer culture that’s been turbocharged over the last few years by targeted ads and the evolution of social media sites like Instagram and TikTok into shopping platforms.
“We’re at recommendation fatigue, list fatigue, shopping fatigue — I think people are exhausted by being asked to consume constantly,” said Elizabeth Goodspeed, a designer in Providence, R.I.
That deluge is now year round, as well. Unlike the catalogs that used to arrive ahead of the holidays in November or December, online gift guides are pushed out constantly. There are travel gift guides that appear before the summer holidays and back-to-school gift guides that come out every August, as well as guides for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, weddings and anniversaries.
Not everyone is tired of them, though, and as the guides have come to prize the obscure, some little-known brands and small business owners say they have welcomed the boost.
“It’s incredibly difficult to get people familiar with a jewelry finish or your fabric quality,” said Janie Kruse Garnett, who has a namesake line of luxury goods including jewelry and bed linens. “Gift guides do so much work by placing you amidst other brands that a person is familiar with so that consumers can place you as a comparable option when they’re shopping.”
For those still stumped on what to gift and daunted by the sea of recommendations, Ms. Goodspeed, who says she comes from a family of “serious” gift givers, has a story.
In the 1970s, her father commissioned a crock that bore the logo of a famous Boston bookstore for his parents. Knowing that the heirloom was set to be a hotly contested piece of inheritance among his own children, he came up with a solution.
“He found the artist who made the crock and had her make four more of them as Christmas gifts for us,” Ms. Goodspeed said. “People tell you what they want.”
Then again, Ms. Alioto might have a more straightforward cure for gift guide fatigue: “Just don’t read them,” she said.
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