Our Colchester

Our Colchester BID reveals winning Gift Card Design

Our Colchester Business Improvement District (BID) are launching The Colchester Gift Card in collaboration with Town and City Gift Card in late summer this year as part of the town centre recovery plan. Recently the BID launched a tender for local creatives to submit designs for the gift card making sure that the design was strongly linked to the town centre.

Local design firm Digital Reflow submitted the winning design which shows iconic town centre buildings including the Town Hall, Castle, Firstsite and the Jumbo in bright colours celebrating both the new and old heritage of the town. The gift card will be able to be spent in participating stores town wide and will be able to be purchased online by customers.

A great range of businesses have already signed up to accept the gift card including Fenwick, Bill and Berts, Baccus, Bang & Olufsen, Attitude, and Dear Grace with more businesses set to come on board in time for the launch of the gift card this summer.

The gift card is being released inline with Our Colchester BIDs Covid-19 recovery strategy which aims to bring people and spend back into the town centre to support local businesses who have lost billions due to the pandemic. The gift card industry is currently worth £7 billion and on average brings an extra 65% spend on top of the gifted amount on the card. This will be the first town wide gift card for Colchester and the first of its kind in Essex.

The gift card also allows people to show their support for their local businesses, as all money on the gift card goes directly to the shops they purchase in. Available to use in a wide variety of businesses the Colchester gift card will be the perfect treat for anyone and the solution for the hard-to-buy-for birthdays. More information about the Colchester Gift Card for customers will be able to be found on the InColchester website closer to the launch of the card. This information will include which businesses are accepting the card and where to purchase it online.

BID Manager Sam Good said “I’m really excited about the launch of this gift card. It's a great opportunity to bring different businesses in the town centre together to work towards recovery. The design from Digital Reflow clearly marks this as The Colchester Gift Card and celebrates the rich variety of heritage landmarks in our town, new and old.

We’re working hard to help our town centre businesses with the difficulties faced due to the Covid-19 pandemic and projects like this lead us a step closer to the recovery our town and businesses need.”