A better way to approach business gifting was
hiding in plain sight.

Before Kimber & Oak, our founder, Kade Kimber, spent years in corporate marketing sending gifts on behalf of the companies he worked for.

Branded merchandise. Generic gift cards. The occasional fruit basket.

He watched companies spend real money on gifts that were quickly forgotten, rarely talked about, and more obligatory than memorable. Companies were spending, but the gifts just weren't doing enough once they reached the recipient.

Kade knew there had to be a better way to approach business gifting. He just never expected the answer to begin with a Christmas ornament.

In 2013, Kade was working on a personal Christmas project: a custom ornament he had imagined but couldn’t find anywhere. So he decided to make it himself, learning glass etching and sandblasting along the way.

Not long after, during a casual conversation while shopping locally, Kade shared a photo of the ornament with a boutique owner. She asked if he would consider selling them in her store. He walked in to make a purchase and walked out with a lease for retail space inside the boutique.

From there, he started applying the same sandblasting techniques to custom drinkware. Around that time, a chance conversation with a top-performing realtor helped everything click. The better version of corporate gifting he had been looking for was already in his hands.

What began as etched glassware quickly grew into a local gifting business. A magazine editor spotted the pieces in the boutique and featured them in a local publication, which caught the attention of a buyer for the U.S. Women's Open. Just three months after opening, Kade was creating gifts for players at that year's tournament.

For the first time in his career, he saw gifting do what companies always hoped it would do. These were not throwaway gifts. They were gifts people kept, displayed, and talked about.

In the early days, glassware orders were sandblasted on his back patio, no matter the weather. Then came a storage unit. Then more equipment, more products, and a larger space. Then another. By the time the business moved into a warehouse, it had evolved into a curated gift box company built around strategic gifting.

For more than a decade, Kade grew the business alongside his corporate career, building it entirely through referrals and word of mouth. In 2024, he left the corporate world to run the company full time. By then, Oak City Gifts had grown beyond its original local identity, and the company became Kimber & Oak.

Today, Kimber & Oak designs and produces strategic gifting programs from its warehouse and studio in Raleigh, North Carolina, helping leading brands create gifts that feel intentional, memorable, and worthy of the relationships they represent.