Hello everyone! I am Leanna Colanino, a senior wrapping up my final semester studying Communication and LatinX & Latin American Studies. Throughout the Spring 2024 semester, I have been interning at Boxxie, a corporate gifting and advertising agency. I had the pleasure of being the marketing intern for Boxxie’s spring quarter, and got to work very closely with the co-founder.

Native Corporate box

Something that stuck out to me about Boxxie was the opportunity to get hands-on work in a number of different fields. Boxxie is a fairly new company and is continuing to grow and work with big name brands such as Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, HBO, and many more. Despite Boxxie’s recent entrance into the corporate gifting world, they’ve made amazing headway, and a large part of that is due to the commitment and attention to detail from the team. The agency is run in a very detail-oriented and involved way; I had the opportunity to be involved in everything from packaging the physical gifts to researching new companies to work, or doing typical daily administrative tasks. 

Stock Samples

Before joining Boxxie, I had no idea what corporate gifting entailed. To be honest, I was simply looking for an internship related to marketing that would allow me to learn something new. I came across Boxxie on LinkedIn, applied, and soon after I had a successful interview and began working with them. I remember looking at their social media accounts to try to familiarize myself with what this industry entailed; I soon learned that corporate gifting is a crucial part of any organization, and that many larger corporations go to agencies such as Boxxie to complete these types of gifts. 

Photoshoot for Call Her Daddy Podcast Boxes

Boxxie handles every aspect of corporate and PR gifting, from the design and planning to the shipment – and I appreciated getting to learn how to manage and organize the numerous steps that go into completing a project. While working at Boxxie in-person for six hours two times per week, I assisted with researching potential product and brand collaborations, social media, content creation, inventory, physically putting the gifts together, shipping the gifts out, and more. Although I was learning many new skills on the job, I felt like I had a good foundation and basic understanding of the marketing industry from my Strategic and Corporate Communication (SCC) courses. The course Marketing through the Communication Lens provided me with a very good foundation of marketing fundamentals; everything from the importance of packaging and color theory, to managing existing products, all the way to smaller things like just understanding what a marketing mix is. This course, on top of the skills I’ve learned through mass media communication coursework, helped me feel confident in the way I conducted myself throughout the internship. One theory I continually thought back to was Uses and Gratifications Theory from my Mass Communication course, which helps explain the reasons that people may use social media; specifically, the social-emotional aspects of social media usage. I think that having a background with this theory allowed me to better understand how to speak to other companies and how to advertise and pitch ourselves to them purely based on the context given by their social pages and the messages they were sending out.

What I loved the most about working at Boxxie was how much I got to do. Some days, I would work from home, doing brand research and campaign work. Other days, I went in-person and assisted with inventory, content creation, and packaging. One specific project that I worked on extensively was Amazon’s Pet Day Project. With this project, I was tasked with helping find products to include, ways in which to include them, and assisting in the design process. What I loved about this project was that I was very involved in the design work of the campaign; getting to see it come to life and now being able to watch the content come out has been so rewarding.

My internship this semester provided me with many new experiences, as well as a newfound confidence in myself and my abilities. My bosses encouraged me to to ask for projects that would align with my values or interests. Therefore, I was able to ask them to help me find ways to incorporate things that I enjoyed doing, such as content creation, events planning, and campaign management. 

Overall, this internship at Boxxie could not have come at a better time; As I complete my final few months at Chapman, I am so happy that I was able to complete an internship where I could grow and learn more about how to run an agency, and how to do it successfully. I would recommend for anyone looking into marketing internships for course credit to give Boxxie a try!