Personalised Cushions
We’re not talking about that gift. The one almost everyone has received at some point. The blurry picture-on-a-pillow. Offset colours. Cheap printing. Worst of all, photo sitting on top of some designer-looking cushion because whoever bought it couldn’t be fucked faffing about trying to make it look decent. That picture gift that ends up on your sofa and looks like an accident.
That’s not the kind of personalised gift we want to celebrate. We wanted cushions that we would actually want to sit on our sofa, not ones you quietly retire to the spare bedroom after you’ve been polite for enough years.
Each of the ones that made this edit passed a test that should be simple but is actually really difficult. They have to be nice cushions to begin with. As objects. Personalisation can’t fix bad quality hardware. The printing has to actually look good IRL, not just the product photographer’s special trick. But most of all they have to avoid feeling like a novelty gift. A one-note gag that is fun for the five seconds it takes to unwrap.
Personalised cushions work best for us at moments like new home gifts. Weddings. First anniversaries. The sort of occasions where you want to give someone a gift that feels uniquely theirs as a person or a couple. Rather than something you could have given anyone. A good personalised cushion will earn itself a home in your living room. A bad one will spend the rest of its life under a pile of shit in your spare room cupboard.
There’s a variety of styles here because some people like different things. Some of our favourite here are beautifully minimal. Some lettering, maybe a date or a coord. Others make photography work where it so often doesn’t. Instead of letting a snap of your loved one hide the actual design, these treats the image as part of the design. Others steal our hearts with clever bits of sentiment without ever being sledgehammer-ish about it.
None of these are cushions we would order as because “oh fuck it, I can’t be arsed searching anymore”. Each of them are things we would swoop down on because we wanted to gift it to someone. That’s the only criteria for making this list.