A scarf is a guess. Your friends already own several thousand photographs of the best year of their lives, and not one of them is on a wall or in a book. Give them that, finished — something that is about them, with them inside it.
Everybody knows what makes a present land: it should be about the person, and it should be obvious that somebody thought about it. Almost nobody manages it, because the thoughtful version is always the one that needs work — and the work is sorting photographs, which is a job nobody ever gets to.
So we do that part. We choose, sequence and lay out the pictures before anyone pays a penny, which means what you hand over is finished rather than something the recipient still has to start. And it is made to be handled — cotton rag torn by hand, a bevel cut at forty-five degrees, a name pressed into Italian leather — so they know in the first three seconds that somebody meant it.
Every one of these is designed by us first, and shown to you before it is made.
Their engagement pictures, laid out on deep matte paper with a wide blank field beside every photograph — so guests write next to the couple rather than into an empty book. It comes back from the wedding already full.
A wide archival mount, bevel-cut around a print of them, with room for a whole room to sign. Everyone else sells the empty version of this. We sell it with the photograph already in it, which is the half that matters.
One picture, chosen and corrected by us, printed on cotton rag with the edge torn by hand, matted or floated, arriving wired and ready to hang. The entry point, and the one people are most surprised by.
A smaller companion to the couple's own album — same cover, same foil, the design relaid for the page. It is an addition to the couple's order rather than a part of it, and because the design is laid out once and every copy is bound in the same run, it costs considerably less than the first book.
Letters, notes and photographs from twenty or thirty friends, gathered quietly through a private link and bound into one book, with their name and the number foiled on the cover. The one gift where the contributors bring the material, so you need nothing from the recipient at all.
Fifty of their pictures, printed properly and boxed, sized so the box keeps growing. The least intimidating way to give somebody their own photographs back, and the easiest to add to next year.
Nobody does. That is the reason these presents mostly do not get made, and it is a solved problem: you tell us who does have the pictures, and we ask them.
Their photographer, their sister, the friend whose camera roll is the real archive. We write, take delivery into a private gallery, curate and design — and then show the proof to you, not to them. The recipient hears nothing at all until the box is in their hands.
It costs nothing to find out whether it will work. The design is free here for exactly the same reason it is free everywhere else on this site.
Everything here is designed for one person and then made, so the honest answer is three to four weeks from the day the photographs reach us — most of which is you taking your time over the design.
| If the date is… | Write to us by | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A wedding you are giving to | Six weeks before | Engagement pictures have to be gathered from a photographer who does not know you yet. |
| A birthday or retirement | Five weeks before | Letter books need time for twenty people to actually write something. |
| Christmas | Mid-November | Production and post both slow in December, and we would rather not promise what a courier controls. |
| Sooner than that | Write anyway | Rush production exists. We will tell you honestly whether it is achievable rather than take the order and hope. |
Worth saying, because it explains the list above. We do not sell empty frames, blank books or unfilled mounts — if it ships without a photograph in it, it is not from us. We do not print song lyrics, newspaper front pages or anything else whose words belong to somebody else. And we do not do laser-cut wood or engraved acrylic, because we do not have that workshop and you can already buy it done well elsewhere.
A private online gallery for your photographs, and a designed album to page through. Leave your email and we will send you a single upload link — your design follows in three to five working days.