Secret Creation

About

Two hundred thousand gifts later, we are still asking the same question. What makes a gift worth giving?

Two hundred thousand times, we have engraved a name that mattered to somebody else.

There are two kinds of gift. There is the one that gets opened, thanked for, and quietly moved to a drawer by February. And there is the one that ends up on a shelf and is still there thirty years later, worn at the corners, picked up every time somebody walks past it. We only know how to make the second kind.

It began with weddings. A spare room in London, a bag of ribbon and one wedding to help with. We made favours one at a time, not very well at first, usually until well past midnight. There was no plan beyond the next box.

What we did not expect was that people would come back, and not for weddings. The couple whose save the dates we printed wanted something for their first Christmas. Then a photo block for the new flat. Then a present for a dad who is impossible to buy for. Then a keepsake for somebody very small who had just turned up. And then, far more often than we were ready for, a frame for somebody who was not there anymore.

We thought we were a wedding company. We were not. We were in the business of the hardest sentence there is, the one that goes on the card.

Most of what we make now is a gift. For the dad who insists he does not want anything. For the friend who has been there twenty years and has never once been thanked properly. For the first Christmas in a new house, the fortieth birthday nobody wants to talk about, the small person who has only just arrived, and the person whose name still gets said at the table. Weddings are still here and always will be. They are just where we learned it.

We are Tony and Daniele, and we spent all of those years making everybody else's occasions. Then last year, after twenty three years together, we finally got married ourselves. We are slow about some things. It has made us a great deal softer about all of this.

Everything is still made by us, in one building in the East Sussex countryside with the South Downs out of the window and a Labrador asleep in the middle of the floor. We engrave it, print it, cut it, check it and pack it. There are more than a thousand designs on the shelves now, and not one of them gets made until somebody asks, because every single one has a different name on it.

The dream has never got any smaller. We want to be the place people come back to for the whole of it. The first Christmas, the fortieth birthday, the new house, the anniversary, the year that was hard.

Two hundred thousand gifts in, we are only just getting started.