Birthday
Birthdays should be simple. One person. One day. One opportunity to impress and yet here we all sit, Googling at 2am wondering if our personalised cheese board will be enough. Spoiler alert: it never is. Trust us, we know from personal experience.
Buying for birthdays sucks not because birthdays are special but because there's so much noise out there. Every shop. Every website. Every Amazon suggestion algorithm is trying to sell you something for a birthday. Nine times out of ten it will be forgotten about before it's even torn open. We wanted to bypass all of the crap to offer something smaller, something way more useful. A selection of gifts we know, without a shadow of a doubt, would make someone smile. Not just fill a box or sit under a bow look adequately impressive.
That's the test we use for everything we pick. Would we give this as a gift to ourselves? Not just anybody. Not someone we’ve vaguely seen around. But a real person we actually care about. Someone whose birthday we've spent time thinking about. Someone we know well enough to recognise their taste. Someone we'll want to see face when they receive whatever it is we send them. Applying that bar hopefully removes a lot of gifts that you'll find elsewhere. Gifts that are trendy but totally forgettable. That's the whole point.
From the person who's really hard to buy for all the way down to the person who's so easy you just want to get them something properly nice for once. We've considered all of the birthdays. The big ones and the small ones. The friend you've known your whole life and that colleague you inexplicably started bonding with this year. Birthday gifts are personal. The stuff we recommend rewards that, rather than trying to diminish it.
There's no experimenting with trends here. We don't add things to our selection because they've performed well on Instagram or they popped up in an emailed press release. It earns a place by being the kind of gift someone mentions years down the line. Or grabs for fun every single day. Or both. You'll notice there aren't many things on this page. That wasn't an accident. We pride ourselves on being curators not generalists. Our opinion is that a small list of great ideas is better than a big list of mediocre ones and this list is our pride and joy.
