Cash accounted for roughly 13% of in-person payments in Australia in 2022, according to the Reserve Bank's Consumer Payments Survey. Back in 2007 it was around 70%. On those numbers, the piggy bank should be dead merch. Instead, credit unions, financial planners, school banking programs and retail banks are putting their logos on coin banks again, and the orders keep coming.
That's not nostalgia. It's strategy. Here's why the humble piggy bank is pulling its weight as corporate merchandise, what to order it in, and who actually keeps one on the shelf.
Financial institutions hand out branded piggy banks because saving money on a screen is abstract, while watching coins pile up in a pig is physical feedback that a seven-year-old (and plenty of adults) can actually feel. A banking app shows a number. A coin bank gets heavier. For financial literacy programs, that difference is the whole point.
Tap-and-go killed everyday cash, but it didn't kill pocket money, coin jars or the psychology of a visible savings goal. If anything, kids now grow up with less contact with physical money, which is exactly why schools and community banking programs want a tangible tool in small hands.
From our side of the print room, the shift is noticeable. Finance-sector merch used to be pens, stress balls and the occasional umbrella. The briefs we see now are tied to the service itself. A coin bank in a new-account welcome pack says "we help you save" without a single line of copy. A pen says "we had budget left over".
The material you choose changes how the piggy bank feels, how long it survives, and how your logo goes on. There's no single right answer, just a right answer for your audience and your budget.
| Material | Feel and weight | Durability | Decoration | Best suited to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ceramic | Heavy, glossy, sits like a gift on a shelf | Fragile in transit and in toddler hands, lasts years on a shelf | Pad printing on curved surfaces, full-colour transfers on flatter panels | Adult savers, home loan campaigns, client gifts |
| Plastic | Light, often translucent so coins are visible | Survives drops, school bags and classroom chaos | Pad printing, spot colour, some models take full-colour digital print | Kids' programs, school visits, high-volume giveaways |
| Metal (tin money boxes) | Solid, rattles satisfyingly, often has a lockable or sealed lid | Dent-resistant, easily a decade of shelf life | Full-wrap printing on cylindrical tins, generous artwork area | Retail promos, goal-based savings campaigns, adult audiences |
One practical note from experience. Ceramic looks the most premium in a welcome pack but needs proper protective packaging if you're posting it. If your campaign involves mailing to members rather than handing over a counter, a metal money tin saves you a lot of breakage headaches.
Most piggy banks are decorated by pad printing, which handles curved surfaces well but limits you to a relatively small print area, usually on one or both sides of the body. Expect a print zone in the ballpark of a large coin to a business card, depending on the model. Cylindrical money tins are the exception, since they can take a full-wrap print with room for a slogan, a URL and even a savings goal tracker.
The mistake we see most often? Clients send their full letterhead artwork, complete with tagline, phone number, ABN and a gradient. A pig is not a flat A4 page. Fine text fills in on a curved glazed surface, and gradients don't reproduce cleanly in spot-colour pad printing.
What works:
If your brand genuinely needs full colour, ask about models with flatter panels or digital transfer options, or go the metal tin route where the artwork real estate is far more forgiving.
The segments that respond best to branded piggy banks are primary school kids, parents saving on behalf of children, first home deposit savers and credit union members with a long relationship to the brand. These groups share one trait. They have a concrete savings goal and respond to seeing progress.
Break that down a little further:
A piggy bank earns impressions slowly but for a very long time, because it lives in the home rather than a drawer. Here's a deliberately conservative example.
Not every bank will survive two years, and some will see more eyeballs than others, so treat these as ballpark figures rather than gospel. Even if you halve the result, you're still paying around a cent per brand impression for a product that sits in someone's home, on topic, doing the exact job your business does.
Custom decoration means ordering at scale, and that quantity is a feature, not a hurdle. Print setup, plate making and colour matching are done once per run, which is why minimums exist. The smart move is planning where every unit goes before the carton lands.
A single order of 500 might split across a year like this. A hundred for a school visit program in term one. Two hundred into new-account welcome packs. A hundred for a branch opening or community event. Fifty as planner and accountant client gifts at EOFY. Fifty held back for staff financial wellbeing week. Same artwork, five touchpoints, one production run.
The name likely comes from "pygg", a type of clay used in the Middle Ages to make household jars, including ones for storing coins. Over time, potters leaned into the pun and started shaping the jars like actual pigs, and the name stuck.
Yes. Even with cash down to around 13% of in-person payments in Australia, piggy banks remain popular as financial literacy tools for kids, savings-goal devices for adults, and on-message merchandise for banks, credit unions and financial advisers.
Adults respond best to ceramic smash-to-open designs or sealed metal money tins, because the friction of getting the money out is the whole point. A translucent plastic kids' model looks out of place on an adult's desk, so pick a weightier material with a cleaner shape.
Common alternatives include coin bank, money box, money tin and coin jar. In promotional product catalogues you'll usually find them listed under "coin banks" or "money boxes", which also covers non-pig shapes like houses, tins and safes.
Yes, minimums apply and vary by model and decoration method. They exist because pad printing requires custom plates, ink mixing and colour matching for each run, and that setup only makes sense across a proper production quantity. The upside is a consistent, quality-controlled batch rather than a handful of one-offs.
Supply your logo as a vector file (AI, EPS or print-ready PDF) in one or two solid colours for the best result on curved surfaces. If you only have a JPEG or PNG, send it anyway and we'll advise whether it can be redrawn for print.
Allow a few weeks from artwork approval as a general rule, with the exact timeframe depending on the model, quantity and decoration method. If your campaign has a hard date like a school term start or branch opening, build that into the brief from day one.
A piggy bank is one of the few promotional products that literally does what a financial brand promises. If you're planning a school program, a welcome pack refresh or an EOFY client gift, send us your logo and a rough quantity. The Promo Punks team will come back with material options, print mock-ups and honest advice on what will survive the post. Get in touch at promopunks.com.au and let's get your brand on the shelf, one coin at a time.
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