Shopofkorea guides
Name-Engraved USB Gifts: Damhwa Nabi, One Name per Person
Official product names are shown in Korean. Product pages are in Korean; prices are in South Korean won (KRW).
It was just as spring was beginning. There were people I had worked alongside on a single project for several months, and when it was over, buying them a meal felt like it wouldn't quite be enough. Their ages and genders were all different, so I gave up from the start on trying to match everyone's tastes.
There was one worry. If you buy several identical items and hand them out, no matter how nice they are, they end up looking like promotional merchandise. I hated the feeling of the recipient thinking, "Oh, everyone's getting one," and tucking it away in a drawer.
The first search term I typed into Shop of Korea was simply "usb." Since it's something anyone uses every day, I figured at least it wouldn't go unused and get thrown away. Along the way I looked at a business card holder with a USB built in, and spent a good while considering a hand mirror too. Even so, I kept coming back to USB in the end.
The 2 items I compared right up to the last were these: one was the USB 메모리-4G 훈민정음, a USB drive featuring a Hangeul pattern. If I had been giving it to a foreign guest, I probably would have chosen that one — because you can share the story that Hangeul carries along with it.
But the people receiving gifts this time were all Korean. I thought something simply pretty to carry around would suit them better than the meaning of Hangeul. That's how I ended up choosing the USB 메모리-4G 담화나비 (Damhwa Nabi — a butterfly-and-peony motif). It has a butterfly and peony flower finished in a mother-of-pearl style, and both are patterns that were commonly used in traditional decorative arts to wish for good fortune. At roughly 3 cm long and 1.5 cm wide, it takes up almost no space in a pencil case or pocket.
The part I put the most effort into with this gift was the names. When placing the order, in the field for printing instructions I wrote, "I intend to give each item separately to a different person with their own name engraved on it, so please engrave them individually," and then listed each name line by line below that. I also requested that the lettering be done in English cursive script. If you put a Korean name in neatly printed characters it looks somewhat like a name tag, but I thought that in cursive it would look more like the signature at the end of a letter.
After submitting the order, though, I looked over the name list again and realized one person's name was missing. For a moment, a chill ran down my back. I immediately added the missing name and resubmitted, and a few days after placing the order I sent another message to double-check the spelling. Because the romanization of Korean names varies from person to person, finding out in advance which spelling each recipient normally uses makes things much less stressful.
I also added a few business card holders in the same Damhwa Nabi pattern to the order. Those were without names. For people who frequently take out business cards, I thought this would get more use than a USB drive, and there were also people I wanted to include beyond those receiving the engraved items. Matching the pattern meant that no matter who received what, it all looked like one cohesive set of gifts. The item currently available in the same pattern is the 명함집세트-담화나비3종(지칼), a design that combines peonies and butterflies with Korean calligraphy.
The day the items arrived at home, I opened each small box one by one and checked the names first. The cursive name was placed in the center, and it looked far more natural than I had expected. I stuck a note on each box so there would be no confusion about whose was whose.
The first person to receive theirs opened the box and immediately held the USB in the palm of their hand, studying it for a long moment. They found their name and said a brief "Thank you," and that one word was the nicest thing to hear. The two people who received a business card holder along with theirs put it straight into their bag right then and there, and everyone else took away the one with their own name on it.
They were all identical items, yet no one picked up someone else's by mistake. That was the whole point of adding a name. When you need to express gratitude to several people at once but don't want it to look like everyone got the same gift, this approach worked really well. Even if the object is the same, once the name is different, the recipient feels that it is "theirs."
This account is based on an actual purchase experience; individuals and organizations have been anonymized and some scenes have been reconstructed.