Shoppers said they’d gift a subscription for Father’s Day. The data says they didn’t (well, not really)

This year, a June 2026 PwC poll found that 45% of Father’s Day shoppers planned to gift a subscription. Food + bev was the single most popular pick, ahead of video streaming and gaming.

Read that and you’d think Father’s Day had become a real subscription-gifting holiday.

Then you look at what people actually call a subscription gift for Dad: Netflix, a few months of Game Pass.

A subscription gift is supposed to say “here’s a year of something you love, because I know you and I love you” With all due respect to Ted Sarandos, a Netflix account doesn’t say that.

People are gifting subscriptions, they’re just gifting the wrong ones.

A subscription is a chance to give something personal, something that shows up every month and tells him you know him. That isn’t how it’s being used, and what should be a big subscription-gifting holiday simply isn’t.

And we can prove it.

Counting orders billed at one address and shipped to another, 9.8% of Father’s Day orders go to a different household, just under an ordinary September week at 10.0%. Mother’s Day looks the same, at 10.0% (even though it’s the far bigger gifting holiday). The only window that actually lifts is the December holidays, at 11.8%.

Our take: the gift calendar is unclaimed subscription CPG space. But the brands that win it won’t be the ones with the most gifted subscribers. They’ll be the ones who keep the subscribers they’re handed.

What people actually gift Dad

The most common Father’s Day subscription gift is a digital login. Video streaming and gaming each came in at 16% of planned gifts, and together that 32% is the single biggest slice, well ahead of food + bev at 22% and a lot more impersonal.

Planned Father’s Day subscription gift (PwC, share of gifters)	Share
Food + bev (top single category)	22%
Streaming and gaming combined (digital)	32%

A streaming or gaming subscription is the kind of gift you can buy without thinking about the person at all.

It says you remembered the occasion, not that you know them. That’s the gap worth sitting with.

A streamer asks nothing of you and says nothing about them; it marks the date and stops there. The same spend on a subscription to a brand they already loves, the coffee they grinds every morning or the hot sauce they puts on everything, shows up all year.

Is Father’s Day a good time to gift a subscription?

Historically, no better than any other time of the year.

Across the weeks leading into Father’s Day in 2024 and 2025, gifting holds at 9.8% of orders going to a different household, the same as an ordinary September week at 10.0%.

A quick word on how we read this.

There’s no “gift” flag in the data, so we use a stand-in: an order billed at one address and shipped to a different one, which is about as close as it gets to “this went to someone else’s home.” It still undercounts a gift that ships to the buyer first, and it can pick up a second home or a work address, but December works as a positive control: if the proxy catches gifting anywhere it lights up there, and it does.

Occasion (same-store CPG, 2024 and 2025)	Orders shipping to a different household
December holidays	11.8%
Mother’s Day	10.0%
September (baseline week)	10.0%
Father’s Day	9.8%

Across a stable set of CPG subscription brands measured the same way each year, the run-up to Father’s Day sits at 9.8%, a hair below an ordinary September week at 10.0%. The only occasion that moves all year is the December holidays, at 11.8%, so the gifting instinct is real. It just shows up in December and almost nowhere else.

The pattern says something about the holiday itself. Father’s Day is a low-ceremony occasion for subscriptions: people mark it, but they don’t reach for the recurring, all-year gift the way they do in December.

For a CPG brand, that means no established gifting habit to ride and no incumbent to beat. Seeing that at all takes a cross-brand view held steady over years, the same lens behind our Subscription Trend Report.

What about Mother’s Day?

Mother’s Day is no different, and that’s the surprising part.

It’s the bigger gifting holiday by a wide margin, with NRF putting Mother’s Day spend at 33.5 billion dollars against 22.4 billion for Father’s Day, yet subscription gifting holds at 10.0%, level with an ordinary week. People reach for flowers, lovely and gone in a week, when a subscription to something she actually uses would arrive all year and keep showing her you were paying attention.

For a CPG brand, that’s the same open lane as Father’s Day.

The gift button already exists

Gift subscriptions are already enabled at 99% of active brands on Recharge, so the capability is rarely what’s missing.

Nearly every subscription brand already has the ability to sell a subscription as a gift: the buyer purchases it, the recipient redeems it and starts their own subscription. The capability ships on by default.

What’s missing is the merchandising and the moment.

A gift option no one surfaces around an occasion is a gift option no one uses. A live example of a real brand’s gift-subscription page belongs here as an image (pick one at draft).

The retention play: turn your subscribers into gifters

The bigger return around any gift holiday is in the base you already have. Turn your subscribers into gifters, and keep the ones they send your way.

The instinct around any gifting holiday is to buy ads against people shopping for gifts. For a CPG subscription brand, the better return is in the base you already have. A few moves, ranked by leverage:

1. Turn your existing subscribers into gifters. A skipped-shipment gift lets a subscriber redirect an upcoming order to someone else, and you keep the revenue. Only about 11% of CPG brands have it switched on, which makes it the most underused lever here.
2. Use the integrations you already run. A Klaviyo, Postscript, or Attentive flow that prompts your base to gift around the occasion costs nothing to send, and a welcome flow off the gift order turns a one-time present into a real subscriber.
3. Time a pause or continue offer to the moment the gift runs out. When a gifted subscription reaches its last shipment, an offer to pause or keep going beats letting it lapse in silence.
4. Measure gifted-to-retained, not gifts sold. The number that matters is how many gifted subscribers are still paying after the gift ends, and what each one is worth over the next year.

tl;dr… Neither Father’s Day nor Mother’s Day is a true subscription-gifting holiday for CPG yet, and that’s the opening. Don’t spend to win gift-shoppers. Turn the subscribers you already have into gifters, then build the handoff that keeps the people they send your way.

About this report

These insights come from active CPG subscription brands on Recharge across food and beverage, health and wellness, pets, and beauty, all selling on Shopify.

We measured gift-giving as an order billed at one address and shipped to a different one, a stand-in for a gift sent to another household, and held the same brands steady across 2024 and 2025 so newer stores couldn’t skew the trend. A stricter cut that counts only orders crossing state lines shows the same shape at a lower level (Father’s Day 3.0%, December 4.3%), the floor on the same pattern. The feature-adoption figures are how many active brands have the capability turned on.

One caveat: the shipping signal is a proxy, not a verified gift. Second homes, work addresses, movers, and PO boxes all show up in it too, which is why we lean on the December comparison as a positive control to confirm it tracks real gifting.

FAQ

Are subscriptions a good Father’s Day or Mother’s Day gift?

They can be a great gift, but the data shows few people actually gift a CPG subscription for either holiday. Subscription gifting clusters around the December holidays. The opportunity for brands is to make the occasion easy and the first weeks worth staying for.

Do gifted subscribers stick around?

The goal isn’t the number of gifts sold, it’s how many gifted subscribers stay after the gift ends. A make-it-yours welcome and a pause-or-continue offer at the final gifted shipment are what turn a one-time present into a recurring subscriber.