There's a particular kind of person who breaks gift shopping. They're kind, they're easy company, and they already own a version of anything you might think of. You ask what they'd like and get a shrug and a "don't go to any trouble". Finding gifts for someone who has everything feels impossible because you're asking the wrong question. The problem isn't that they own everything. It's something more specific, and once you see it, the shortlist gets a lot shorter.
Why someone who has everything is so hard to buy for
Here's the thing nobody says out loud: they're not hard to buy for because they own a lot of things. They're hard to buy for because the gap between wanting something and owning it is, for them, about four minutes long. Any gap you spot they've already closed themselves, usually weeks ago and without noticing they'd done it. So you're not really competing with their possessions. You're competing with their next Tuesday afternoon.
That changes what you're looking for, and it explains why the usual instinct steers you wrong.
Jeff Galak, Julian Givi and Elanor Williams set out a useful framework for this in Current Directions in Psychological Science in 2016. Their finding is that givers focus on the moment of exchange, while recipients focus on how valuable the gift will be once they own it. We're picturing their face when they open it. They're picturing the next six months of living with it, which is a different brief entirely, and it's the one we keep failing to write for.
That gap explains a lot. The pressure you feel to be surprising and impressive is real, and it's aimed at about ninety seconds of someone's life. They're evaluating the other six months.
What to get someone who has everything: ask one question instead of twenty
Stop asking what they don't have, because the answer is nothing and that's precisely why you've been stuck. Most lists of presents for someone who has everything are just lists of objects, which is the same wrong question with better photography.
Ask this instead: what would they never get round to buying for themselves?
It's a different question and it has actual answers. People don't buy things for themselves for two fairly ordinary reasons. Either it feels a bit odd to buy for one person on a normal Wednesday, or it needs an occasion to justify it and the occasion never turns up. That's the whole gap you're working with. It's narrow, but it's the only one you've got, and it turns out to be more than enough.
Five gifts for someone who has everything that they won't buy themselves
Five categories survive that question. Almost every gift for the person who has everything that actually lands comes out of one of them.
Things that get eaten
The person who has everything has a storage problem, whether or not they'll admit it. Anything you send that needs a shelf is a small imposition dressed up as a present. Anything that gets eaten leaves nothing behind except the afternoon it happened in.
That's the reason edible gifts hold up so well for hard-to-buy-for people, and we've covered the range of them properly in our guide to food gift ideas rather than repeating it here. The short point is that a consumable can't become clutter. It can only become a good hour.
Things that arrive rather than sit
There's a version of gifting where the gift is the object, and a version where the gift is the arrival. For someone who buys their own things whenever they like, the arrival is the part they can't replicate.
A box landing on a Tuesday morning with no occasion attached does something a shop-bought object doesn't. They didn't order it and they didn't choose it, and that's the whole of the effect. It turned up because you were thinking about them, which is the one thing they can't get for themselves at four minutes' notice. Our letterbox gifts are built for this, small enough to post and awkward enough to justify that they'd never order one for themselves.
Things that get shared
Watch what happens when a box goes on a kitchen table. People drift towards it, someone puts the kettle on, and the gift quietly stops being an object and becomes twenty minutes with other people in it.
A single object goes in a drawer. A cake hamper gets opened in front of whoever happens to be standing there, and the person who has everything usually has people, which means you've handed them something to do with them.
Things with an occasion built in
Some gifts come with a date attached, and the date is the point. An afternoon tea has to be sat down for. You can't do it standing at the counter with one eye on your phone, because it takes an afternoon and it insists on that afternoon, and someone who has run short of excuses to stop is being handed one.
That's a real gift for a person who has run out of things to want. You're not giving them another item, you're giving them a reason to shut the laptop, and it's the kind of reason they'll never schedule for themselves.
Things that keep turning up
Here's the category people forget. Somebody who buys anything they want the moment they want it almost never sets up a standing arrangement for themselves, because it feels like an extravagance in a way that a single purchase somehow doesn't, and there's no occasion to hang it on.
Which is why a subscription lands strangely well with this person. It arrives after they've forgotten it was coming, it repeats, and each time it turns up it does the same trick the first one did. You make one decision and they get several months out of it.
Gifts for the man who has everything, and gifts for the woman who has everything
Both of those phrases get typed into search bars constantly, and they're a perfectly sensible place to start. Our gifts for him and gifts for her collections are built exactly that way, and if you already know their taste, browsing by who it's for will get you there quickly. Hard to buy for gifts are a slightly different problem, though, because what makes this person difficult has less to do with their gender than with their situation. So here are the situations that actually change the answer.
The one who has been decluttering
They've spent a year getting rid of things, so sending them an object is asking them to undo their own work, and they'll be gracious about it and then quietly rehome it within the month. Consumable gifts and experience gifts aren't a compromise for this person. They're the only thing that respects what they've been doing.
The one who's always travelling
They don't want anything bulky, anything fragile, or anything that needs watering while they're away. What works is something that keeps, or something sitting there waiting when they get back. Something with weeks on its shelf life suits this person far better than anything with a three-day window on it.
The one who says "don't get me anything"
Take them at about seventy per cent. They mean don't spend a lot and don't make a fuss, and they rarely mean ignore me completely. What works here is small, warm, clearly not expensive, and obviously chosen for them. A box of brownies says you were thinking about them without putting them in the awkward position of having received Something Significant.
The one who already bought the thing you were going to buy
This will keep happening, so stop trying to win that race. Move to the categories they can't pre-empt, because nobody orders themselves a surprise.
Christmas gifts for someone who has everything
Christmas sharpens all of this for one structural reason: everybody buys for the same person at the same time. Your carefully chosen object lands alongside four other carefully chosen objects, in a house that was already full back in November.
There's a second trap that only appears at Christmas, and it's a well-documented one. Mary Steffel and Robyn Le Boeuf, writing in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2014, ran six experiments on what happens when you shop for several people at once. Givers pass up gifts that would be better liked in order to give everyone something different, because treating each person as unique feels like the thoughtful thing to do. It isn't. If the same shareable thing would land well with three people on your list, send it to all three.
The clutter question also stops being a nice principle in December and becomes the whole game. It's the one time of year this person is guaranteed to have people in the house and something to put on a table, which makes anything shareable work harder than it would in March. A hamper works less because it's festive and more because it's the only gift in the pile solving a problem they've actually got that week.
And if you're posting to several households at once, sending directly to each one saves you a fortnight of admin. We've written up how to send gifts to multiple addresses separately.
The mistakes worth avoiding
Most gifts for people who have everything fail for one of three reasons, and all three are well meant.
Spending more to prove you thought about it. Francis Flynn and Gabrielle Adams looked at this directly in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2009, and found that givers expect a link between what a gift cost and how much it's appreciated, while recipients report no such link at all. You're buying reassurance for yourself, and it isn't cheap.
Reaching for novelty. The gag gift gets the biggest laugh in the room and the shortest life afterwards. If the whole value sits in the moment of opening, you've written for the wrong brief again.
Assuming bespoke is the answer. This one's worth being clear about, because "they have everything, so make something one of a kind" is the obvious next thought, and it's often not the fix. A design that's been made properly hundreds of times is usually better made than something improvised once. Our celebration cakes are exactly as shown on the site, with a hand-piped message of up to 25 characters if you want one, which sounds like a limitation and works as the opposite when you're sending to someone whose standards are high.
The short version
They're not hard to buy for because they own everything. They're hard to buy for because they close their own gaps fast, and they close them before you've noticed the gap was there. Give them the thing they'd never get round to buying: something eaten rather than kept, something that arrives, something shared, something with a date attached, or something that keeps coming back. Stop trying to out-surprise them with an object, because that's the one contest you'll lose every time.
If you'd rather have a shortlist than a principle, our letterbox gifts are the easiest place to start for something that posts and gets eaten, and the subscriptions are worth a look if you'd like it to keep turning up for a while. Both do the one thing this person can't do for themselves, which is arrive without being asked.