“They have everything” is almost never true. What is true is that everything they want, they can buy on a Tuesday afternoon without mentioning it to anyone. Which means the gift economy you grew up with — I identify a need, I fill it — has stopped working for this person.
Once you see it that way, the shortlist gets much shorter, because there are only three things left that money cannot quietly buy on their behalf.
1. Something only you could have made
Not handmade in the craft sense. Made from information nobody else has: the year you both had, the running joke that would need four paragraphs of explanation to anyone else, the specific corner of a specific street. This is unbuyable by definition. They cannot order it on Tuesday because they are not the one holding the material.
This is the strongest card you have, and most people never play it because it feels like it does not count — it did not cost enough. That instinct is worth ignoring.
2. Something that requires you to have been paying attention
A person who can buy anything is a person who is rarely surprised. The surprise is not the object; it is the evidence that someone was watching closely enough to notice the thing they never said out loud.
A test: if the gift would work for their colleague, it is not this. If it would make no sense at all to anyone outside the two of you, you are close.
3. Time that is already arranged
Not “we should do something sometime.” A date, a booking, a countdown to a specific day. Someone with everything usually has one genuine scarcity, and it is not money.
What to avoid
Going bigger. The most common reaction to “they have everything” is to spend more. It almost never lands, because you are competing on the one axis where they are better resourced than you.
Novelty. The engraved thing, the personalised-in-thirty-seconds thing. Personalisation is not the same as meaning. A name printed on an object is still an object with a name printed on it.
Experiences chosen for their impressiveness. Hot air balloons and supercar days are gifts about the gift-giver's imagination, not the recipient's life.
The uncomfortable version
Sometimes “they have everything” is a way of saying I am not sure what they care about at the moment. If that is closer to the truth, no shortlist fixes it, and the honest move is a conversation rather than a purchase. We have written elsewhere about who this kind of gift suits and who it does not — including the situations where the right answer is to not buy anything.
But if you do know them — if you could fill a page with things only you would recognise — then you are not short of ideas. You are sitting on the only gift they cannot get for themselves.
Open an example, or build one.