You can buy a California gift basket that a maker packs and ships, or gather the goods and post it yourself, in which case most of the work is packing. If you build it, wrap each glass item on its own and set the basket in a corrugated box with 2 to 3 inches of cushioning on every side.
That cushioning figure comes from FedEx, and it's the number to build any mailed gift basket around. Anything with perfume in it goes by ground.
Buy one packed, or build your own
A ready-made box saves you the packing and the trip to the post office. Our Gift Box Sampler ($95) packs soap, marmalade, four lip balms, two bottles of eau de parfum and an essential oil into one box, with four themes to choose from. We pack it and send it straight to the recipient, usually within one business day and three at most.
Building your own lets you mix makers and add a card in your own hand. You pay the postage and buy the packing materials, and the risk of a broken jar is yours too. If the person is someone you know well, that's often worth it. For someone you'd struggle to shop for, the packed box is the safer send.
What should go in a California gift basket?
Pick things that don't mind a few days in a truck. Sealed jars and dry goods travel well, and so does bar soap; lip balm and candles do too, except in a summer heat wave. Leave out chocolate and anything that needs a fridge. What makes the basket Californian is the pantry. Citrus marmalade is an obvious start, and the state supplies 99 percent or more of the nation's exported almonds, dates, and olives and olive oil, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
Weight matters as much as fragility. A basket of four glass jars costs far more to post than one jar with lighter goods around it, and glass is where breakage happens. One jar of California marmalade makes a good anchor. Each jar carries a best-by date more than two years out, so nobody has to rush.
Leave the wicker basket unwrapped only if you're hand-delivering it. A basket has no walls strong enough for a sorting machine, so for the mail it goes inside a box.
How to pack it, step by step
- Wrap each glass jar or bottle separately in bubble wrap or several layers of paper, so no two pieces of glass can touch.
- For any breakable container holding more than 4 fluid ounces of liquid, such as a bottle of olive oil, surround it with enough absorbent material to soak up the whole contents, and seal it in a leakproof bag or other secondary container. This is the triple-packaging rule in section 3.4 of the USPS Domestic Mail Manual 601.
- Settle the wrapped goods in the basket, heaviest at the bottom, and fill the gaps so nothing slides.
- Choose a sturdy corrugated box big enough to leave 2–3 inches of space around the basket on every side, per FedEx's packing guidance. A reused box is fine if it's undamaged.
- Fill that space with crumpled paper or air pillows until the basket can't shift when you shake the box.
- Seal the top and bottom with the H method: one strip along the center seam and one across each edge, using pressure-sensitive or water-activated packing tape at least 3 inches wide, which is the width FedEx specifies.
- If there's liquid inside, mark the outside of the box as liquid and add orientation arrows, as the DMM requires.
How much does it cost to mail a gift basket?
For Priority Mail, USPS bills a box over 1 cubic foot (1,728 cubic inches) at its actual weight or its dimensional weight, whichever is higher, and it finds dimensional weight by dividing the cubic inches by 166, per its 2026 Priority Mail service guide.
A 14 × 14 × 10 inch box is 1,960 cubic inches. Divided by 166, that's 11.8, so USPS bills it as 12 lb even if it weighs 5 lb. A 14 × 12 × 10 box comes to 1,680 cubic inches, under the line, and it's billed on actual weight. A basket plus proper cushioning rarely fits under 1 cubic foot, so for the mail a shallow tray or no basket at all is often cheaper. Keep the cushioning and save the space elsewhere.
USPS's July 2026 price list also adds $4.50 at retail to Priority Mail and Ground Advantage parcels that contain more than 24 ounces of liquid in glass, or that are themselves a wooden or metal box. A wooden crate sent bare picks up that fee. Put it inside a cardboard carton so the outside of the parcel is ordinary corrugated board.
Distance moves the price too. A 5 lb parcel by USPS Ground Advantage costs $12.95 at retail to the nearest zone and $26.05 to the farthest.
Perfume and international parcels
A basket holding alcohol-based perfume, our Gift Box Sampler included, goes by ground within the US and can't be mailed abroad, so allow the extra days. Everything else we make ships across the US, to Canada and to some Western European countries. Import duties and taxes on international parcels fall to the recipient, which is worth telling them before a box turns up with a bill attached.
Sending baskets to several people
For a list, the work is addresses. Our multi-address shipping gives each gift its own address in a single checkout, and we ship each one directly. When the boxes arrive, there are ideas for reusing our packaging rather than throwing it out.
Photo by Kelli McClintock on Unsplash.
