The BBQ Cook and Dine Gift Set launched November 2023 at £84. It was our first set to put the Gaucho BBQ Grill Apron alongside tools in a single package — Gaucho, BBQ Blade, and Bison Skewer. We’d sold the apron and tools separately for a year. The Cook and Dine Set was the first time we said: these belong together, here’s the complete picture.
The idea came from a simple question we kept asking in customer conversations. When someone is buying the Gaucho as a gift, do they want to add tools, or do the tools feel like a separate decision? The answer we kept getting: when you’re gifting, yes, the tools complete the story. The apron alone is a statement of intent. Apron plus tools says the recipient is properly equipped. That difference in perception is what justified building the set.
The Gaucho as Hero
In the Cook and Dine Set, the Gaucho is the centrepiece. It’s the product with the most visual presence, the most obvious craft, the Protected Design. The BBQ Blade and Bison Skewer are the supporting cast — useful, well-made, but secondary to the apron in a gifting context. We designed the set around that hierarchy. The apron is what someone is buying when they choose this set. The tools are what makes it complete.
At £84, the set comes in meaningfully below the cost of buying the components separately — Gaucho at £75, Blade at £10, Skewer at £15 adds up to £100. The saving is real, not cosmetic. That matters in a gifting context where the buyer is making a deliberate investment in something they want to feel generous about.
The Packaging Challenge
Assembling a set that looks gift-ready without expensive custom packaging required thought. The apron folds flat; the tools are slim. Getting them into a single box that felt cohesive — not random items thrown in together — took several attempts with different arrangements. We weren’t commissioning bespoke gift boxes for a first run. We needed something that worked with what we had, presented in a way that still felt considered.
The solution was in the presentation: consistent wrapping, a single card explaining each product, everything oriented so the unboxing had a clear order. The UGLY box on the outside; something satisfying on the inside. The constraint of not spending on custom packaging pushed us to think harder about what goes inside it and how it’s arranged.
What the Set Taught Us About Bundling
The Cook and Dine Set confirmed something we’d suspected: not all bundles are equal. A tool-only set is for the cook who already has an apron or doesn’t want one. A cook and dine set with the apron at its centre is a different purchase — more personal, more complete, more clearly a gift. Understanding that distinction helped us think more clearly about what each bundle in our range is actually for and who it’s actually for.
