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.

100th Birthday

100 years isn’t a milestone, it’s a monument. And coming up with a gift worthy of that is one of the tougher briefs in gift giving. Because there’s nothing generic will suffice and everyone in the room knows it. This isn’t some birthday you can buy something nice looking and call it done. They’ve lived the entire twentieth century and a large chunk of this one. Outlasted fashions, technologies, governments, and probably a few of your best ideas about gift giving. We built this collection because when it came to centenary gifts, every other gift guide simply failed. They offered…

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16th Birthday

Gifts for sixteen year olds aren’t easy. They’re too old for anything remotely childish, but too young for lots of stuff that’s marketed at adults. Most gifts for sixteen fall into that middle zone. Too far either way and you risk getting it wrong. Too young and they’ll shame you by hiding it. Too old and they’ll accept it gratefully, before it gathers dust. We’ve been thinking a lot about sixteen year olds recently. The 16th birthday is special. To them. It feels special even if the rest of society isn’t quite ready to celebrate that yet but your gift…

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18th Birthday

Eighteen is the only birthday where the pressure is real. Less because of the actual number and more because everyone from the birthday boy or girl themselves knows that it means stuff. Everyone buying for them knows that it means stuff. Which means that a ‘fuck it’ gift lands with more weight on this birthday than any other. You can’t just pick something nice and be done with it. This birthday needs something special. We built this list because we kept noticing the same problem. People reaching for the booze. Or novelties. Or something stupid with ‘18’ printed on it…

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1st Birthday

No one at a first birthday party is buying a gift for the one-year-old. It’s okay to hate that fact. Once you get over the horrible emotions then it becomes clearer than anything else. Presents are for parents. Parents who have successfully kept a human alive for one year on mostly cold coffee and pure disbelief that they haven’t yet failed at everything are buying these gifts. So we put real thought into what actually deserves its place at their party. Not gifts guaranteed to get trampled on at midnight. Not number five of the five same mouse/key-monkey/puppy they’ll receive…

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21st Birthday

Twenty one is the birthday that still feels like a birthday. Past the teendom of eighteen, but not so far that it’s just another year on the calendar. Twenty one is the gift everyone else had stopped giving you but that you still want. So when it comes to your child, sibling, best friend; you want to get it right. We spent a long time curating this selection. Looking for pieces that spoke to that transitional period. Not wanting to mark their birthday by giving them something they’ll never use. Everything in here is different. No useless gimmicks or novelty…

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30th Birthday

Thirty is the birthday that everyone is indecisive about. It’s special enough that you don’t want to get it forgotten toast slide number forty-two from Costco. But you also don’t need to make a day of it when your friend turns thirty. They’ve figured out what they like by now. They know good taste. Which is helpful for you if you’re the one purchasing, because it means that off-brand stuff is out, and they’ll know if you half-arsed it. This is why we created this list. Getting thirty gifts right is tough. You’re at an age where you’re not requiring…

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40th Birthday

Forty is the only birthday you really feel about. Not always complex emotions. But feelings nonetheless. Forty arrives differently than the rest and the gift you celebrate it with should recognise that. Wine and a card chuckling about how old you are just isn’t going to do. If you’ve come searching for a better way to mark the big 4-0, then you’ve come to the right place. Like any occasion that means something, forty calls for something that feels like it was crafted specifically for the job. The problem is, most people who are turning forty have already established pretty…

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50th Birthday

You can’t ignore turning fifty. Someone you care about is reaching a milestone that feels momentous, that warrants more than an apology of an effort, and all of a sudden popping down to the shops for a bottle of wine and a card feels woefully insufficient. We felt that too. Which is why we’ve put more effort into this collection than we usually give ourselves credit for. Choosing gifts for a fiftieth birthday is hard because by the time someone’s had fifty birthdays they’ve had fifty years to collect all the kitchen gadgets. They’ve got the nice wine glasses. They’ll…

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60th Birthday

Sixty is not a quiet birthday. It’s the one people have opinions about; the one that gets a party or at least some substantial conversation about whether it gets a party; the first birthday where the guest of honour has usually stopped pretending they want something when clearly they don’t. The last part, at least, makes our jobs easier. We don’t have to pretend to like something they’ll never use. We just need to find the gift for the person who is actually there. The issue with most sixty birthday gifts is that they fall too far down one side…

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70th Birthday

Seventy isn’t just another birthday. It’s one of those landmarks that actually means something. The air sits differently around it. Seventy holds gravitas. Milestones. A life well-lived. And everyone who knows someone turning seventy senses that weight whether they’d care to admit it or not. This isn’t a milestone you want to mess up with some jokey gift picked up at the drugstore. We created this gift guide because we know how difficult it can be to find the perfect gift. Something that matches the occasion without getting maudlin or patronising. Turning seventy is not a laughing matter. Not like…

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80th Birthday

Eighty years is not a small accomplishment. A gift for eighty years should not be a small effort. Eighty is the birthday where a little something just won’t cut it. Where an easy but uninspired present isn’t just an accidental oversight, it’s a befuddling indifference to the magnitude of something that took eight whole decades to reach. We discovered that was difficult to buy for than it sounds like. Because so much of what gets paraded as the gift for a milestone birthday is just your everyday consumerism dressed up with a fancy ribbon. We wanted different for this. We…

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90th Birthday

90 years isn’t an anniversary you celebrate with something forgettable. The ninety-first is the one where the gift actually has to live up to the birthday person, and that is a tougher brief than you might think. Most stuff marketed at the 90-year-old demographics swings between depressingly novelty (“All jokes about being ancient!” says the tin) or so universal you’d buy it for someone at any age. Neither of those feels right. So we didn’t look for either. We looked for things that felt weighty. Not expensive for expensive sake but substantial. Presents that say we’ve put some thought into…

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