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October 10, 2017
I have two very clear memories from when I was little and I wonder if they will resonate with you. The first is of a girl that I was at school with when I was maybe seven or eight, and she was called Elizabeth Fry and had beautiful long ginger hair. I thought it was just amazing that her parents had found a car that happened to have the word FRY as the last three letters of the registration plate, I mean what were the odds?
One January she returned to school with a full set of colouring pencils, at least 500 of all the colours (okay, my adult brain realises it was probably no more than 30 pencils) and each one was embossed in gold with her full name. ELIZABETH FRY. Right there, in glittery gold on a rainbow of fun. I was in total awe of how this was even possible. It's pencils, but with your name on! And I admit I was so jealous. I'd have given my right arm to be sat at my school desk, swinging my long, red locks, choosing one of twenty types of pink to colour in my unicorn, with a pencil that was clearly just mine.
Elizabeth's parents were obviously pioneers of personalisation and way ahead of trend.
The other memory I have was of a t-shirt that I had when I was a little younger. Sky blue, with a cartoon dog on the front, complete with a collar and a little tag that identified him as 'Patch'. Over the dog, in a bold slab serif font, was my first name, NICOLA (this was before Betsy was adopted as a nickname obviously) and it related to nothing at all on the t-shirt and I'm sure for a while I thought the dog was called Nicola too, before I found the tag that is. But it was definitely a Seventies thing to have a t-shirt with your name on it. I've watched old episodes of the Red Hand Gang, it wasn't just me. I loved that t-shirt in the way that only a five year old can love a t-shirt and somewhere in a box in the loft, I still have it.
For a really, really long time, this is what personalisation meant. It was a case of just adding a name, and not necessarily in any kind of meaningful way. (Although I totally get the school pencils thing from a practical *NameAbsolutelyEverythingThatMoves* perspective.)
Fast forward a couple of decades and the IT revolution has put technology, skills and most importantly, machinery into the hands of people who simply couldn't afford it or access it before. And when you put that machinery into the hands of creative artists and designers, whoa, look out world.
I want to briefly tell you about a friend and amazing designer and business owner, Kyleigh Orlebar, owner of Kyleigh's Papercuts. She trained as a graphic designer and honed her skills for some twenty years before she even launched her own business. That training included such highlights as hand drawing each and every letter that she needed on projects, learning the swoop and shape of every letter of fonts such as Gill Sans, or carefully placing individual letters from a letraset, judging the space between every placement in a methodical and meticulous way. Until macs came along. With every shiny new Apple release, another process was made easier and quicker and jobs that used to take weeks could now be completed in hours.
Take Kyleigh’s best seller - the Personalised Family Tree. Family trees are designed around the family names themselves (not simply typed onto a branch on a template) and with up to 7 names per tree and endless combinations of characters making up names, it’s understandable no two trees are ever the same. There is no quick way to approach the tree design or clever computer trickery (no “GENERATE DESIGN” button!). Kyleigh maintains she starts each one with a blank sheet of paper (that’s a blank sheet in Adobe Illustrator of course). It is her decades of design training which has allowed her skills to be honed in such a way for her Family Tree Papercuts to be a viable commercial personalised product. A product which is available machine cut, cut by Kyleigh’s fair hand and trusty scalpels or indeed available as a Do It Yourself template if you fancy getting all whizzy with sharp things! Imagine how long it would have taken in the pre-tech world?
Now I’m not saying that there isn’t still a market out there in the personalised world that is just about putting a name on something and ticking the job done box. Honestly, sometimes that’s all you want and all you need. But in the grander gestures of what we want our gifts to say about us and our relationship with the receiver, personalised means so much more than adding a name. Spoiler alert – sometimes it means not “personalising” anything at all – but more on that later.
And you know this is where Notonthehighstreet.com came in. The founders, Holly Tucker and Sophie Cornish, recognised really quickly that there was an army of artisans and crafters out there, regularly pitching up at markets with their wares, able to pretty much customise anything they made for individual customers. The only snag was you'd have to go back next week to collect your purchase.
In a move that took the giftware industry by storm, Holly and Sophie put their faith and their bank accounts into building a platform that could host multiple artisans (5000 at last count) and service millions of customers, but that crucially allowed you the space and functionality to capture vast amounts of personalisation in one visit. And then your item was posted to you, no need to make a return visit to a market that maybe you had only been passing during a visit to seldom seen Auntie Doris.
It seems like a blindingly obvious thing to have done with hindsight, but it was completely groundbreaking at the time. And even now, some eleven years later, people are still trying to catch up. As a seller on a variety of marketplaces including notonthehighstreet I'm amazed that no-one has yet been able to come close to it, let alone better it. The beauty is in the tech.
There is literally no limit to the amount of variations that we can now offer on our products (unlike on Etsy, as much as we love it, where we can only offer two variables) and the world has become your oyster.
Take our 'Story of Us' print for example. I created this design as a wedding anniversary gift for my partner so I really went to town on it in a way I probably wouldn't have if I'd started with a commercial perspective. I built the circular design with 17 'chapter headings' that served as bullet points of our life together so far. That summer we spent living in East London, working and playing hard; our days at Keele University and the bars and hang outs we frequented; the time when just four of us booked out an entire restaurant and ate with the chef who became a good friend; our wedding song; our much loved pooch; the arrival of the small miracle in our lives when we became three. Then I added three illustrated landmarks to break up the text. And it all looked a little flat in one colour so I chose some text to highlight in a different colour. It was perfect and it made him cry.
I realised I could offer everything I had designed in this print, on one product page on my storefront. We have a huge colour chip selector so you can have one colour for the majority of the text and another colour for just highlighted words. We have a page of illustrations that you can choose from to add detail to your story. And of course there are 17 'chapters' for you to fill with your own text to create a story that is totally yours and extremely personal. You can have it unframed or you can choose from three different types of frames to complete the gift. Oh, you can see a video of it being made, here.
It was an instant best seller. How could it not be really? Here was a personalised print that you could choose every single element of. Make the colour match the décor of your home, or your favourite team’s colours if you must! You can bring out all the important highlights, whatever those happen to be for you. It reflected your very own story, in your own words. (Because you know that feeling when sometimes something fits about 90% of your story and you jump on it, like a song maybe, and you just conveniently ignore the bits that don't fit, and the slightly teenage phrasing? Yes, this isn't that.)
This level of creating someone’s story, in their colours and words, is a world away from just adding names to that poster of the kiss in Paris by Robert Doisneau (especially as we’ve never even been to Paris together anyway).
Prints were the first and most obvious area that exploded with all the personalisation options. In part, because your raw materials are a blank sheet of paper, a really good art printer, and your imagination. It allowed people to be insanely creative whilst holding very little in the way of stock. Inevitably there is a huge range in the quality of personalised prints that are out there and I’ll admit, we’ve had a fight on our hands to keep our share of this booming market. You can read all about what makes a Betsy Benn personalised print something special in this blog post here.
It wasn’t long until personalisation started appearing on all manner of unusual products and in unusual ways. Jewellery went from being simply engraved, to containing hidden messages, sometimes in code. Christmas stockings were not only embroidered with a name but also made out of a much loved and long-since outgrown item of the child’s clothing. We really are in a brilliant time in retail you know. We can have that one to one relationship between maker and customer, create something beautiful together, make the perfect gift for your perfect friend and we can do all that and connect from literally anywhere in the world. Of course, this couldn’t have happened before the internet and before the platforms existed to connect us. So YAY for the tech!
And with each bit of new tech that comes down in price, and more affordable to the artisans, boy do you see an explosion in beautiful personalised gifts! A prime example from the last 3-4 years had been with laser cutters. (“Wait, what? You cut things with a laser? Are you a Bond villain?”)
Laser engraving and cutting machines have gotten so good and so small lately that there are ‘desktop’ versions – I kid you not. And with any massive development in the tech, inevitably the price comes down, making it affordable for the artists and then we really get to play and have fun! I’ve seen laser cut wooden bow ties, jewellery, notebooks, leather belts, hair bands, wedding dresses, flip flops that leave messages in the sand as you walk across the beach, innovative lighting shades and about a gazillion different types of greetings cards. I asked the lovely Bryan at Trotec (where our lasers are from) what the oddest thing he’d ever engraved was. He said, he’d engraved the banana he’d brought in one day for a snack. It looked amazing, but the aroma was something else!
Of course, we love our laser. We’ve played with greetings cards, toyed around with keyrings and made some notable notebooks and passport covers over on our sister site, Luna Studio Designs. Where we found our niche though was in personalised Christmas ornaments and customised coastlines.
Ah, Christmas. How much I love you – yes, I am a self-confessed Christmas nut. So you put a laser cutter in my creative paws and Christmas gets a full treatment! Our range of personalised Christmas tree decorations and ornaments always start from that feeling of being slightly uninspired by the range offered on the high street. I used to make an annual pilgrimage to the Christmas departments of Liberty and Selfridges amongst others and once upon a time I’d be coming home with handfuls of beautiful Christmas ornaments. But, not so much lately. I pined for something unusual, meaningful and of course beautiful. So we set about designing our own using all sorts of wood as a base. One of our favourites is cedar wood, because that herby smell is just heaven and the pattination is, quite frankly, gorgeous. Though we’ve also used bamboo (technically a grass as you know), walnut, eucalyptus, poplar, sapele and pine – because the synergy of making a Christmas tree ornament out an actual Christmas tree was too splendid to pass by. We team the beautiful natural woods with some metallic elements as well, in bronze and silver, giving that extra special Christmas sparkle to our Moon and Constellation inspired ornaments.
Of course, because we can, we make most of them personalised or adaptable. This is where the messaging becomes really important and lifts a tree decoration from being just another thing with a name on it. Nowhere is that more true than our Baby’s First Christmas ornament. I thought for a long time how we could word something like a letter from Father Christmas to a newborn. Something that would stand the test of time and would be a relevant memory to that child as they grew older. This is what it says;
Dear Olivia
The Man in the Moon sent me the wonderful news of your arrival. Welcome to your very first Christmas! When you get big enough to write, do send me a letter. I love letters. Grow well little one. I’ll check on you from time to time.
Merry Christmas
Santa xx (or you could choose Father Christmas depending on how you refer to the big guy in the red suit)
We’re really pretty happy with it. It talks to the main characteristics of the legend that is Father Christmas – that you can communicate with him by sending him a letter, that he checks up on you to see you’re being good and that he brings gifts – his first being a beautiful Christmas tree ornament, of course. You can see the full range of our awesome laser cut and engraved Christmas ornaments here, both personalised and not.
Ah yes, remember when I mentioned that sometimes creating the most meaningful gift might mean not “personalising” anything at all – well sometimes we don’t personalise things. I know, I know, let’s pick ourselves up and I’ll expand.
Quite often really, the beauty of a gift is the story behind it. A feeling, a shared history, a moment, a dream, a wish, encapsulated in one perfect present, maybe with a bow on top. This was the starting point we came from when we developed our coastline art prints and wall hangings. If you think about the important moments in your life you might decide that there is a great song that represents that year, or that moment, or there’s possibly a movie or a book that summed up that time in your lives and even now connects you all in a feeling, years later. But you might not have a movie or a song or a book. The one thing that I guarantee you have though, is a place. Whatever happens in our lives, it has a location, a geographical pinpoint. And when I looked at the significant events in our lives, you know what – a lot of them happen by the coast! Maybe it’s the islander mentality in us, but we all seem to like to hop to a decent stretch of beach for inspirational moments, and sometimes for our whole lives.
So with our laser cutter and our gorgeous woods and a luscious colour range of acrylics, we set about creating an abstract expression of a coastline that you could choose. Technically, we are not personalising it, the seas created the bays and inlets after all. But it’s personal and meaningful to you because of what happened there and what the place has come to represent. It speaks to the history between you and the moments you have shared. To find and give something that embodies your relationship like that, we think is the best kind of gift there is.
And it was all made possible by putting the machines in the hands of the artists. Who knew?
October 08, 2017
It’s a staggering first, and one that you definitely don’t feel fully ready for in the moment. There’s been months of waiting, quite probably frayed nerves and anxious hearts. There’s been pacing and medical tests and scans and consultations and schedules and parties and good wishes -- lots and lots of good wishes. But on the day, while you and your partner - whichever of you is the beautiful goddess giving birth -- have plenty of moments of staring into the abyss, wanting to get this ‘thing’ over with, wondering who you’ll be on the other side of it…. a baby is suddenly placed in your arms. The sweet smell of their forehead dances in your nose and their tiny tiny fingers might just manage to clasp themselves around your finger for the first time. There is screaming and wailing, for sure -- this is part of the soundtrack of new life. But, there’s something else. Something new. You are something new, a new story has begun, and you have have this sense that you have been welcomed into a life club you never knew existed but that you’ll never leave from this point forward: the experience of providing, marking, and remembering another person’s ‘firsts.’ You are the first person this baby has met. This is this human being’s first breath. First meal. First smile. First haircut. First word. First tantrum. First bicycle. First heartache….First car. You hold this baby, smelling their forehead for the first time, and while I would love to say something profound like, “You promise this baby in these quiet moments the best of yourself in the coming years” -- the truth is, what you’re really wondering those first nights is when the most important of all firsts will happen: how long until this child will actually sleep through the night for the first time?
You might have 11 months to prepare, or your baby might be born on Christmas Eve. But Christmas comes around in this first year of your baby’s life and with it one of your first moments as a parent for marking what makes the year, and a life, magical. The best thing we’ve found about Christmas in our studio and on our travels is how different the practices and traditions are that parents all over the world have for producing Christmas for their kids. Yes, producing. Yes - we talk about festivities and magic. Yes, we believe in this magic deeply. But we are also parents and we are realists, and Christmas is a production! It’s food, light, parties, gifts, moments, waiting, giving, wrapping, cleaning, preparing, planning, remembering, with what we hope is a deep deep sense of satisfaction as you sit in your pyjamas Christmas morning and let the show finally take care of itself.
In time with your kids, Christmas morning really will begin to take on a life of its own. Toddlers and adolescents running around with the toys they’ve longed for, phone calls to family, rustling everyone through meals and outside for whatever activities are planned all seem to take care of the day. But the first Christmas with your baby is a different feel altogether. So much of the production can wait, because there is just so much work that focuses just on your newborn and you finding your feet. And so, while Christmas looks different in all corners of the world, we think that first Christmas, instead of the crazy, is really is all about moments of quiet -- the occasional stillness you stumble upon when the baby’s needs are met, when you’ve managed to get just a few ornaments on the tree, or you find yourself eating a mince pie in the middle of the night after feeding baby (note: baby does not eat mince pies. Yet.). Stillness. Quiet. Peace. If this is what Christmas brings you, and your baby in their first year, then we think you’ve made the magic happen. Welcome to the Firsts Club -- Christmas will never be the same, and you wouldn’t want it to be.
And so we’re focusing on the little things for Baby’s First Christmas: Here in the studio at Betsy Benn, we’ve handmade a number of wooden Christmas ornaments that combine modern styling with simple materials to make sure Baby’s First Christmas is remembered, that the ornaments make it onto the tree, and that you’re freed up to start the scrapbook after the New Year; you know, once the baby is beginning to sleep soundly through the night.
One of my absolute favourites from our range of Christmas decorations is inspired by the simple beauty of the moon. When I was small, my Mum used to tell me all sorts of stories about the moon and if ever I was worried or scared of the dark she would help me to find Mr Moon, shining brightly in the sky, and told me he was looking for me and shining his brightest to try and make me smile. It always worked!
If I could hang the moon on our Christmas tree, I probably would. So to try to recreate it we searched for a long time to find just the right materials to do justice to that heavenly body!
The beautiful Baby Moon first Christmas decoration is made from a circle of either cherry or walnut wood veneer. It’s then layered with a crescent moon silver laminate that’s been engraved with a photographic image of the actual surface of the moon (courtesy of the NASA website)!
The baby’s name and year of their first Christmas is engraved on the wooden side along with a constellation of stars.
Strung with a white satin ribbon it looks stunning on any Christmas tree.
Still a little bit in love with the moon, we realised our job wasn’t done. Then, last Christmas I found the time to sit down and watch the film It’s A Wonderful Life for the very first time. I know! Having finally seen it, I can’t believe I hadn’t watched it before either. And that scene where George offers to throw a lasso around the moon and pull it down to Earth just for Mary, well that inspired our second moon decoration that would work so well for a baby’s first Christmas ornament.
We used our NASA image once again, this time to create a stunning full moon for our Lasso The Moon ornament. Shiny, silvery and utterly gorgeous. Then we designed two child silhouettes to do the actual lassoing. The wooden children are suspended from the full moon by a baker’s twine lasso, pulling the moon down to Earth! The best bit is that we can engrave any name and year on to the back of the moon, making it such a personal and unique first Christmas decoration.
Now, I know we made them, and so we are bound to be a little bit in love with them, but I honestly can’t express how pleased we are with how they turned out. My tree is going to be covered with moons this year. I just know you will love them too, even more so if that movie holds a special place in your heart.
For something with more of a story attached, you can’t do better than our Letter or Telegram from Santa/Father Christmas. These heritage first Christmas ornaments take the style of a letter or telegram from the main man in the North Pole, welcoming the new baby to their very first Christmas.
Santa encourages the child to write to him when they are old enough and it is a great story item to share with the child as they grow up and can read the letter for themselves.
Addressed individually to each child, both styles are postmarked as if from the North Pole and show the year of arrival. Strung with a festive red ribbon they just sing Christmas!
I have to admit something here. This telegram is the ornament that we have at home for our own bear’s first Christmas. However, as he was born in 2006 and we didn’t launch this company until 2010 … well let’s just say it’s a good job small babies have imperfect memories about Christmas (yes – we added it in late). These days, my son can’t wait to start decorating the tree with me every Christmas and his first ever letter from Father Christmas is the one decoration he searches for and the one that he insists he put on the tree himself. I love that we have been able to give him that piece of magic and that the magic has endured for this long. Every year I hope it lasts just a little bit longer!
For those that prefer the simplicity of just a name and a date, then our scandi inspired bear, reindeer or star decorations are the natural match.
Our polar bear and reindeer Nordic creatures are individually cut from cherry wood veneer, perfect for a natural or woodland themed Christmas. Once cut, a constellation pattern is engraved on the surface along with a name. There’s room to engrave the year under the child’s name making it a perfect reminder of baby's first Christmas.
And so to our star, with which we return full circle to a celestial theme, making it the perfect companion to our moon decorations. A few of our cleve customers had the brilliant idea to get new baby moon decorations for the newborns and then stars for all the other family members to create a mini galaxy!
Our intricate star ornaments are individually laser cut from a scented cedar wood veneer, and feature more stars in the engraved detail that surround the baby’s name. You can choose whether to include the year or not. With a satin white ribbon to finish, they make the perfect personalised decorations for any member of the family, and especially the newest ones!
September 18, 2017
You can be a total Christmas lover at any age, even as a forty-something ever so slightly obsessed with gingerbread houses and straight to video Christmas movies, but even I have to admit that the ultimate magic of Christmas is just for the children.
There’s just something about the sparkle in their eyes when “Santa’s been” that whizzes us back in time, to our own childhoods when we felt that rush of excitement, and it makes it real for us all over again. Even if just for a moment.
And maybe that’s why we put so much thought and energy into making it special for our own children, now that we are officially Santa’s helpers. We help deliver the magic, so we can feel it again and rejoice in seeing our children totally and utterly in its thrall.
Well, that right there could explain why I do the job I do. I’m one of Father Christmas’ official elves for thousands of children every year. I get to take part in creating the magic. Because of what we do, that grin on Christmas morning is a tiny bit wider, and the magic of Christmas lasts just a few precious moments longer. Can I here and now tell you how awesome that is!
So what magic do we make?
We set up the backstory. We make history.
Our unique Baby’s First Christmas wooden tag decoration is the first letter your child ever receives from Father Christmas. Here, the big guy in red, welcomes them to their very first Christmas after being informed of their arrival by no less than the Man in the Moon.
Santa lets them know that he’ll check in on them from time to time, and invites them to write to him when they are big enough to write, because he loves receiving letters you know.
The letter or telegram (it comes in two styles!) is personally addressed to them and even postmarked with the year of their birth. It hangs beautifully on the tree until they are old enough to read it and then it really comes into its own.
I can’t tell you how much it meant to my own child when he read his letter from Father Christmas for the very first time and understood it. He clutched it to his chest, beamed from ear to ear and yelled at the top of his lungs “thank you Father Christmas, I love you too!” Job. Done. I may have had a little something in my eye at that point.
He knew that this benevolent magical figure in his life had been there from the very beginning, and here was the proof. Carved in wood (well laser engraved to get technical), with official letterhead stylings and strung with a gorgeous red Christmassy ribbon. It looked exactly like every concept of Christmas that existed in his five year old head.
Zoom forward six years and we decorate the tree together every year, just one of many traditions that we enjoy, and it’s the first decoration he looks for and wants to place on the tree himself. It conveniently also nudges him to put pen to paper and write to Santa once again and send his letter by chimney post! Every year I wonder how long this magic will last. And every year I wish for at least one more year please. Here’s hoping Santa grants my wish again this Christmas. xxx