We made the Sunday Times Best Places to Work list. Here's the story behind it.

This morning the Sunday Times published its Best Places to Work 2026 list. Huggg is on it. It's the first year we've entered, and we made the cut.

If you've found this page after seeing our name in the paper and Googling who we are, hello. The rest of this is for you.

Where Huggg came from

Huggg started in 2015 as a coffee gifting app - a way to send a friend a flat white from across the country. Not a serious business idea on paper. But people loved it, and over time it became clear the same model could do something bigger: let companies send gifts that recipients actually choose themselves, instead of the usual hamper-by-committee that gathers dust under someone's desk.

Then the pandemic hit. We had a gifting platform, a network of partner brands, and a sudden problem - nobody was sending coffees anymore. So we repurposed the platform to distribute free school meal vouchers and welfare payments, routing millions of pounds of support through the same tech we'd built for sending someone a cookie.

It wasn't really a pivot. It was the same thing, used differently. And it taught us something about what we actually are: a company that's at its best when it's helping people give to other people.

That experience became the foundation for what Huggg is now - a UK corporate gifting platform that lets businesses send gift cards and curated choices to their teams and customers, with no recipient sign-ups, no points expiring, and no admin pile-up.

What it's actually like to work here

Here's how the Sunday Times described us:

"At [...] Huggg the team of 20 is fully remote, while those who prefer to work in a shared office space are funded by the company. Fittingly for a present-giving business, thank-yous are tangible via a 'team appreciation' budget for peer-to-peer recognition. An annual £600 wellbeing budget encourages staff to switch off, and a £1,500 development budget supports their personal and professional progress. A sabbatical policy is a recent introduction."

- The Sunday Times Best Places to Work 2026

We're not going to list our seven culture pillars. They're on our culture page if you want them. What's worth saying instead is the texture.

We hire carefully. Slowly, sometimes annoyingly so - because the person matters more than a tidy job description, and most of the people who work at Huggg have been here for years. That kind of tenure is rare for a company our size, and we've leaned into it. We recently introduced a sabbatical policy so the people who've been with us longest get proper time to step away, travel, study, or just rest.

The team also recognises each other constantly, and yes - we use our own platform to do it. Birthdays, work anniversaries, the random week someone covered for a teammate without being asked. It's not a programme; it's just what people do. (It's also a useful sanity check on the product. If our own team isn't reaching for Huggg, something's wrong.)

We argue a lot, too. Not in a bad way - we're an open, no-blame team that thinks debate is how you find the right answer. Junior people disagree with senior people in meetings and nobody gets weird about it. If you've worked somewhere that politely nods along until everyone leaves and complains in DMs, this won't be that.

And we give back. The pandemic work changed us, and we've kept choosing projects in that vein since: working with charity partners, building tools that let businesses fund welfare and recognition properly, not just performatively.

Also - and this is genuinely a nice part of the job - we taste-test products. Someone has to.

What the recognition means

What this means to us is less about the list itself and more about what sits underneath it. The team filled in an anonymous WorkL survey, and what they said was honest enough and positive enough to put us here. That's the part we actually care about.

"We're thrilled to be recognised on this list. We've taken a deliberately people-first approach at Huggg, acting with flexibility, generosity and kindness towards our team, which in turn is reciprocated by our team's dedication and care for each other and for our customers. This makes for a very happy place to work, but also one where our expectations and standards remain high. We were particularly pleased that every single person in the organisation was surveyed, and so it was a true representation of how it feels to work at Huggg."

- Paul Wickers, founder and CEO

A gifting company that's genuinely good at recognition internally isn't ironic. It's the only version of this that makes sense. We practise what we sell, and we'll keep doing the same things that got us here: hiring carefully, paying fairly, debating openly, and giving back where we can.

If this sounds like your kind of place

We hire when the right person turns up, not always on a fixed schedule. If you've read this and it sounds like somewhere you'd want to work, have a look at our culture page and get in touch.

And if you're reading this as a business wondering what we actually do: we help UK companies send gifts that people genuinely want. Over 200 brand options, no recipient sign-ups, no expiry admin, and one of the most flexible gifting platforms in the country. You can see how Huggg works here.

Thanks to the Sunday Times and WorkL for the recognition - and to our team for being the reason it happened.