Personalised Gifts
The beauty of a personalised gift is that it takes the guesswork out of buying. You aren’t wishing that they’ll like it. Wondering if you’ve got the right size. Questioning if they already have one from another well-intentioned gift-giver. You picked something, you made it theirs with a name or a date or a line of text that no-one else will understand the significance of, and now it is theirs and no one else’s. That’s the whole idea. And it’s a good idea.
Where personalisation has become a problem is when it’s used to dress-up an object that wasn’t really gift-worthy to begin with. Placing a name on a rubbish keyring doesn’t make it magic. Stamping a date on a low quality print doesn’t turn it into wall art. We’ve thought long and hard about this and our conclusion was simple; the personalisation should enhance an object that was already going to be a good gift, not carry all the significance for an item that would otherwise be unwanted.
That’s our philosophy for choosing what makes the cut here. We start with the item, and consider if we would give it as a gift by itself. No? Then it doesn’t make the list. This leaves us with gifts that we would happily buy without personalisation. Adding that final detail is icing on the cake, not the basis of the gift.
Some of these work perfectly for certain occasions. A baby shower, a milestone birthday, a wedding, new homeowners. Others aren’t about celebrating a moment so much as celebrating a person. That kind of gift that lets someone know you were paying attention.
We’ve paid attention to lead times as well. Because a personalised gift that turns up late is easily one of the worst outcomes when it comes to gift-giving. Everything here is something we’ve tested ourselves or researched thoroughly enough that we can recommend confidently. If we know that timing is critical we’ll let you know.
The last thing you should feel when giving a great personalised gift is like you’ve fallen into a gimmick. You should feel like you gifted someone proof that you were paying attention.
