Betsy Benn Home and Gift Blog

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?

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?

“We think that first Christmas really is all about stillness -- those few moments of stillness when the baby’s needs are met, you’ve managed to get a few ornaments on the tree, or you find yourself eating a mince pie in the middle of the night after feeding baby.”

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.

Baby’s First Christmas Ornaments with Betsy Benn

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!

“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...”

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!

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

We really pondered how best to approach this blog post. I mean, we know that we design and make the best personalised prints in the UK (probably the galaxy actually) but we’ve got that proper British humility going on and don’t normally love blowing our own trumpet. But there’s also that knowledge that unless we tell you all about it, how will you know?

And, although we were one of the first companies in the UK to offer such a wide range of awesome personalised prints, lots of others have sprung up in the meantime and we’ve noticed quite a few differences in the way we go about this business of making something beautiful for you. So, trumpets at the ready – because we think you deserve to know all about it.

Betsy Benn's Original Designs

All of the prints on our website have been designed just by us and just for us. We have our own website (you’re on it now!) and storefronts on notonthehighstreet.com, Etsy, Hard to Find in Australia and a small selection on Houzz and that is it! So if you happen to have seen something similar on another website and it doesn’t have a Betsy Benn tagline underneath, then it’s not one of our designs and not an original.

We’re kind of flattered to have seen lots of prints that are similar to ours pop up over the years. Kind of! It reminds us that we created something beautiful and appealing and we’re proud to be style originators, not followers. And we know our totally lovely customers appreciate that too. Thank you for supporting us – it means a lot!

Here's our original Playlist Cassette Print, one of the top sellers on our site. It won best new product on notonthehighstreet.com

Real Actual Designers

Wow, this one took us by surprise. There are a few places out there where you can order a "personalised print" but an actual person hasn't designed it for you, it's all been configured by some software. Right here and now we’d like to state that every single one of the 50,000 plus prints that we have created over the years, and all the ones we'll ever create, have been individually worked on by a talented and qualified graphic designer. Not only a brilliant and skilled person in their own rights, but a designer that has then been extensively trained in the Betsy Benn house style so that all our prints over the years will have a cohesive look and feel. Your print will not be designed by a software algorithm that has about as much finesse as a sledge hammer would have on a soft boiled egg.

Yes, an algorithm has the benefit of letting you see an “instant preview” of your print on line, but the limitations are high! If you want to move something around, or make one word a different colour, or give one thing more importance or less, well the algorithm just can’t deal with it. It’s not programmed to. And should you accidentally make a typo or notice something after you have paid that is not quite right, then no matter how quickly you let the algorithm know about this error, it can't be changed, because even the printing process is automated.

The whole thing just sounds a bit, odd, to us. Surely, the reason you are shopping for a personalised print is because you want something that you can have complete input to and make it really meaningful for the recipient. So why would you settle for something that only seems to do half the job?

Luckily, our human designers can do ANYTHING for you (well – for your print anyway!) And we’re really happy to just chat on the phone about it, or try a couple of different variations to see what works best. 

So instead of an “instant preview”, we prefer to email you a proof of our more bespoke prints so you can see exactly how they will look and then make any of the changes that you'd like. Only once you've signed it off do we print and post. We like to think of it as the difference between a supermarket jar of instant coffee and a slow-roasted speciality java made by the barista that knows you at your favourite boutique deli! Essentially, both still qualify as coffee, but we know which one we’d prefer!

Take for example our iconic destination bus blind prints and canvases. Our designers work with you to create exactly the emphasis you want for each special destination. The variation in font sizes between lines and even on each line provides visual interest and a clue as to the importance of each place.

Beautiful Materials

Once you’ve spent time and energy creating a beautiful and personal artwork with one of our designers, you’ll want to have that print made on some beautiful archive quality paper or canvas with some amazingly vibrant inks that won’t fade. And if you want your print framed, then you’d like some solid wood frames – trust us you do (no composite MDF thank you – leave that to Ikea), made by a professional and finished ready to hang. Sound good? Well that’s our standard level of service for every print we make.

We’re always keeping on eye on developments in print technology too and have expanded our range of prints to include wooden and metallic bases on which to create your unique artwork. Our metallic prints are exclusive to us, engraved in stunning gold, silver, copper or bronze substrates and not just foiled.

Exceptional Customer Service

Six years ago we won our first ever award and it's probably the one we cherish the most. The award was for Best Customer Service and it set the bar high from the outset. I hope it's clear that everything we do, from the designs to how we proof to the materials we use, the whole process in fact, has been designed with customer satisfaction in mind.

Need something really quickly? Let us know and if we can accommodate it, we will. Need a duplicate print because the dog thought that postal tube was the 21st Century version of a stick? We keep all our artwork files in a large archive and can reprint and resend most prints for a nominal fee. Need to create something identical to the photographed sample, slightly different, completely different, we're happy to chat about anything and everything.

We want to be proud of everything we send out and we want our customers to absolutely love what they receive, and be the most excited to give a Betsy Benn original as a gift to someone they love. And we want to hear about all those exciting "they loved it" moments. We even set up a little hashtag on Instagram where you can share your Betsy joy at #loveBetsyBenn. More importantly, we also want to hear about any not so lovely moments. Rare as they are, they do happen - the one downfall of using humans instead of algorithms to do everything - but we will do everything in our power to make it better. 

The Betsy Benn Difference

So, that's a short summary of how we know we are different (*whispers* better) from the hundreds of other print designers and makers out there. There are lots of other, quirkier ways too. But the fact that we sing Christmas songs whilst wearing fluffy reindeer antlers and elf ears from about mid-September (and actually really like it) might not be quite so relevant. Hopefully, you've liked what you've seen and are ready to give us a try. If you've any more questions, drop us an email on betsy@betsybenn.co.uk or give us a call on 01242 570731. Let's make something gorgeous together!

So you need ideas for a wedding gift for your husband? For him? For that certain gentleman with impeccable taste who already chose you to spend the rest of his life with? I’m pretty sure we can help with this.

It’s often said men can be tricky to buy for even in the most everyday of shopping experiences, but this isn’t just any man. This is the main man, the love of your life and he needs something stunning and beautiful and full of love and something that he will love and find stunning. Well, luckily for you, you haven’t popped by to just any store. This is the main store, the store that can bring you something stunning and beautiful that we just know your husband will love. Why? Because you are going to choose it for him, and we already know you have exquisite taste because you chose him to spend the rest of your life with.

This isn’t going to be difficult AT ALL. This is a brilliant opportunity to get a bespoke artwork on your walls that suits his more masculine tastes, but also hits all the right buttons for you because they are so stylish. And of course, exceptionally meaningful without being twee.

Let’s begin with a few questions:

Where Did You Meet?

It’s that age old question, and one you’re going to be asked quite a bit, pretty much for the rest of your life by every new friend! You’ll refine the story with each telling, but the one thing that won’t ever change is the geographical location of where you first laid eyes upon each other.

Maybe it was at University and the campus and halls hold some great memories for you both. Perhaps it was at a train station after first emailing and calling each other for what felt like ages before finally agreeing to meet.

Wherever your story began, our beautiful map prints are perfect to remember that momentous location. A personalised wedding gift that he is bound to adore and remind him of the moment he fell in love. We have both printed and metallic maps, but generally the metallic maps are the ones that draw the most admiring looks and gasps of “that’s amazing, how do you make that!?”

Our metallic maps are not simply foiled onto card stock like many shiny prints these days. We actually engrave them with our high precision laser into a metallic surface that is either gold, silver, copper or bronze. We take out all the street and place names so we’re left with a network of just roads, rivers and train lines. Each feature of the map has a slightly different level of engraving, so if a road goes over a river, you’ll see that, giving it a textured depth that flat foiling can’t achieve.

Incidentally, if the place you met was at his mate Dave’s house, or just not very inspiring, these map prints also work brilliantly for the location of the proposal, wedding or honeymoon!

What’s Your Special Song?

We all have at least one special song with our other half that reminds us of them. Maybe you walked into a room singing it and he was mesmerised “who is that girl!” Or it could have been THE love song of the year that you started dating. This might even be the song that you are going to walk down the aisle to, or share your first dance to. So now you have the song in your head, what’s the best line? Is it a line from the chorus (all you need is love!) or a snippet from the second verse maybe. It will probably relate to your romance in some way or another, so is the perfect snippet for our Song Lyrics Personalised Print. A simple design featuring a coloured circle, which is very reminiscent of a vinyl record when in black, and a block font text for your choice of song lyrics. The emotion comes through from your chosen words and the design appeals to all.

Or maybe you have more than one special song and couldn’t possibly just choose one to characterise your relationship. You need a whole playlist!

We have you covered here too and these are especially popular as both wedding and first anniversary gifts for men. The simple black and white nature of the design and our textured, aged cassette tape images go extremely well together. And with 16 tapes to personalise you can create a print that captures the soundtrack of your very own RomCom.

 

Has It Been a Bit of a Journey?

Some of the best stories have had many twists and turns and seen lots of locations before reaching that happy place of finally being together! It’s okay. These are the stories that will make your friends laugh and you’ll be telling your grandchildren one day (okay, maybe not ALL the details for the little ones!) For the story of your romance, the personalised destination bus blind is perfect.

Based on the original London Transport Routemaster bus blinds, these classic prints have longevity and style written all over them. There are sixteen lines for you to personalise with any of the relevant places, memories, holiday locations, streets you have lived, times you had to spend apart, favourite restaurants, people’s names – anything really. Each line becomes a “stop” or destination in the bus journey of your adventures together! We have lots of examples on our website for inspiration.

These are excellent wedding (and anniversary) gifts for the men folk in our lives. All the destination prints are available in a range of colours, but classic black and charcoal are by far the most popular. And in one smooth hit, they are both slightly retro with a cool London Underground vibe (we use the original Johnston font designed specifically for London Transport) but also extremely current with clean unfussy lines and tightly justified text. Your partner will love it for both the design aesthetics, but also for the sentiment behind each line and the thought you have put into capturing your story.

 

Does He Make You Laugh?

Humour is essential in a great marriage. What was the funniest thing he ever said to you? Or what was the thing he said that suddenly lit up your lightbulb and you realised this was it, forever? With our personalised quotation prints you can go for some offbeat humour and capture him at his best!

Designed as part of our bus blind range and using the same luscious fonts, these prints are presented in a landscape format. There’s a wide variety of background colours to choose from so you can pick a room in the house that it will sit best in before you order

I think our work here is done, but if you want to take a look at our whole collection, just in case there’s something even more splendid, then we have a whole host of prints that would make perfect gifts for him on your wedding day. And, no, even though YOU are the best thing he is getting on that day, you don’t get to use that as your gift!

Happy nuptials!

You’ve used that mode of transportation commonly known as a bus before right? Even if you are super-duper posh and normally get flown everywhere by your own troop of unicorns, you’ve caught a bus at least once. Even Her Majesty the Queen hopped on board the Cambridgeshire Guided Bus in 2013 – there’s photographic evidence and everything!

And just how did both Queenie and you know what bus to get (assuming you didn’t plan your route on citymapper). THE BUS TOLD YOU!! That little information window above the driver faithfully displayed its numerical classification and intended destination in off-white or yellow text on a black background. It might have said Brixton, Barking, Buckingham Palace or Betsy’s House (in my dreams) but you knew the end point of that fabulous vehicle. Which, when you stop to think about it, is pretty handy!

Destinations and stopping points have been displayed on buses since 1829. To put that in some historical context, President Jackson was trying to buy Texas from the Mexicans but they weren’t having any of it, Russia and the Ottoman Empire (get your history books out) were signing a peace treaty, but the Brits were putting our first Bobbies on the beat and sorting out properly informative public transportation signage!

The original buses (even the horse drawn ones) had a single place name on a plaque. By the 1930s, bus routes had become more complex and all the destinations were silk-screen printed on to paper strips that were then pasted on to rolls of linen up to 30ft long. Later still, bus blinds were screen printed directly on to rolls of man-made fabric that could be any length. If you want to see some of these first hand then I highly recommend a visit to the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden. They have some very fine examples of VERY long bus blinds hanging from the ceiling of their very beautiful building and you can even have a go in a tube simulator and pretend to be a train driver.

Side note: at the end of the article is a link where you can see the whole process of a modern destination bus blind being made. It’s fun, but don’t skip down there just yet!

But how did these functional items of signage move out of the buses and into our homes to become the ultimate statement piece of urban art?

Well, the love of vintage has a lot to do with it of course. We’ve always loved bringing unusual things into the homestead and breathing new life into them. This decade has brought us the apple crates as shelves, the bare Edison light bulbs in LED form (sometimes being held by resin mice and monkeys!) and mason jars as drinking glasses. With works of art on walls the vintage world has been our oyster. Anything from album covers to sheets of stamps to gig tickets to advertising posters has been co-opted into our homes. And why not? All the aforementioned usually have great graphic elements to them and are perfect for displaying!

So why bus blinds?

Destination bus blinds have been turning up in auction houses and antique markets for quite some time now. Bus routes change, or get decommissioned, or place names get updated, new stops get introduced or the blinds just get worn from being cranked around so many times that they get a second or third edition made!

What makes them so appealing owes a lot to the designs skills of calligrapher Edward Johnston and the eponymous font he created especially for London Transport. The brief was to create an easily read font that would tie all of the Underground signage together under one brand and make them distinct from advertisements. The font should also belong “unmistakably to the twentieth Century”

Amongst many characteristics, its perfect circle O, straight sided M, and diamond dots above the i and j make it instantly recognisable. Adopted across the whole of Transport for London and then later as the font for the GLA, the London Assembly and the directional signage for London 2012 Olympics, it seems no other font represents London quite so distinctively. This is maybe why bringing it into the home instantly evokes an urban out and about feel!

Many of the decommissioned bus blinds were chopped up (oh the inhumanity!) and individual destinations were framed and displayed, but it didn’t take long at all before whole length bus binds starting appearing on discerning walls in interiors magazines such as World of Interiors and Elle Decoration.

I guess this is where Betsy Benn came in. A full length original bus blind, as blissful as it is, had some peculiar combinations of destinations. This might work for you and is very authentic! But what if you could have every destination that had ever been important to just you and not the whole of your town?  

What if your very own destination bus blind could start with where you grew up – maybe even as specific as the road you lived on. And then journeyed through the schools you went to, the parks and high streets that knew the teenage version of you. A personalised bus blind that traversed the holidays you loved and the places you discovered when you met and fell in love with that someone special? Could it even pick out restaurants and beaches and that one location and date where someone proposed spending the rest of their life with you and you accepted?

Well, lucky you! Because, since 2010 that is exactly what we have been creating. A full range of bespoke destination bus blinds to capture all of those amazing adventures and memories.

Our first creation was a metre and a half long canvas in homage to the original form and function of the destination roller blinds, and it sits in my home to this very day. Charting the path of the first 15 years spent with my husband, we took the best and the beautiful parts of our lives together and created the bus journey of our dreams! We were the first company in the UK to offer these amazing personalised works of art and they still hold a firm place in our hearts.

After the canvas option came the long thin destination print. Again this was unique in the UK and to us. The sizing allows us to capture 16-18 destinations and place names and is not a standard sized print like the A3 and A2 options. It’s very reminiscent of the bus blind shape and format and works so well.

This print graced the front of the Notonthehighstreet.com Valentines Gift Guide in 2011 and essentially propelled both us and the personalised bus blind into the limelight! It wasn’t until an article was published in the Independent in 2012 that we learned the bus blind print had been the TOP selling item across the whole site in 2011. It seemed that the concept and our interpretation of this design classic had really struck a chord with people.

As a company, we have very strict styling rules for every bus blind print or canvas that is ordered. Similar I guess to the rules that apply to the guys making the functional ones for the actual buses! Letter point sizes have rules, the spacing between letters (or kerning) have rules, where and when we take prefixes and suffixes and make them smaller (words like station or in dates the TH) have rules. It’s very much the first thing that all our graphic designers are taught when they join the company, and prints are not allowed to leave the building unless they are signed off by a style expert!

That way, we can ensure that each print is in our own unique style, but also is very recognisably inspired by the original Routemaster bus blinds.

More bus blinds followed and our range of personalised destination prints is now the most comprehensive and fabulous anywhere in the known universe (it’s in a blog post now so it must be true!) We have bus blinds for weddings and anniversaries, big birthdays, new babies, graduation and gap year gifts – all sorts! In fact, for any life story you can imagine, we can create the perfect destination style print.

And although they look beautiful in classic black, we can print them in any colour you would like to match your own personal tastes. More recently we have added gold, silver and bronze metallic prints in the same style. Perfect for wedding gifts and anniversaries! We even offer some in the most gorgeous Sapele wood that we could find!

And in case you were left in any doubt that these are simply the best custom prints in the whole wide world, here is a picture of Richard Curtis giving one to Dustin Hoffman after the filming of Esio Trot. Two of the nicest and most brilliant people anywhere in the universe, actually.

 

Silk-screen printing of a modern destination bus blind:

 

Your friends are getting married! Brilliant! And now the day is creeping slowly closer in the calendar and you need to get a gift. A fab gift, a wedding gift worthy of your fabulous friends.

The Betsy Benn take on wedding gifts for your mates is that you can go one of two ways:

1. Stick to the list (if they have one) - maybe you'll find something more inspiring than a toaster.
   
2. Go off list and create the best and most unique wedding gift ever that references their story and maybe your friendship with them, be the talk of the town, have EVERYONE asking the happy couple where they got it from and generally win at gifting!

We've got presents for the home and personalisable pieces that will become post-wedding talking points. There is no hard and fast rule on how much you should spend but there should be something here for individual and joint budgets big and small.

So here’s our round-up of the best prints to give and who they work for.

The Cool but Sentimental Urbanites

The fashion for art on walls has evolved into displaying statements of your life story like never before! And these two prints are classically simple, yet artistically beautiful enough to stand the test of time. The best part is that you don’t need to know all the intricate details of their story together, as these prints commemorate the date and place of the wedding – all information that you can get from the invitation. Personalisation at its most simple is quite often the best!

For the nostalgically modern, we recommend the Bus Blind Wedding Date Print. Reminiscent of a Routemaster bus blind it’s both retro and current – a quirk of a design that is truly classic. A simple way to show the date, time and place of the wedding as well as the couples names.

For those with a love for clean lines and possibly a Scandi interest in design and colours, we have the Personalised Coordinates Print. Simple blocks of colour and clean unfussy fonts show the coordinates of a special place with two additional lines of text. Maybe the date and place they met, but this works just as well with the wedding place and date.

The Music Lovers

Maybe your friendship group all used to go out to the same pubs and clubs together and had a bunch of tracks that would be guaranteed to get you all up and dancing! Or you know the songs that they love the most or could find out by asking the person organising the wedding music for a set list. However you do it, a personalised music print will be just the ticket to celebrate the happy union.

We have the Retro Cassette Playlist for up to 16 tracks from a playlist.

The single vinyl or cassette prints for that one special song, perhaps their first dance! Or a song lyrics quote print, to pick out a beautiful line in a special song that seems so fitting to their relationship.

The Travel Lovers

If the wedding itself is overseas then you can pretty much guarantee it will be near a coastline of some description. If the wedding isn’t, then the honeymoon probably is.  A sure fire unique win of a gift can be found in our range of coastline products. From the beautifully simple Coastline Line Drawing, to the unique Wooden and Acrylic Coastline Clocks and Wall Hangings (see this blog post for more details) a coastal themed gift will be a gorgeous and heartfelt reminder of their big day. Further personalise with some text details for a truly meaningful gift.

For the city dwellers and honeymooners, how about one of our bespoke abstract maps. Available for literally any location in the world these designs take the humble map to a new level of artwork. And each can be personalised with any two lines of text such as the place name and maybe the date of the wedding.

With two finishes available, you can go classic with a printed version in a variety of palettes, or you can add a modern touch with our new metallic engraved maps which are simply sublime.

 

So with our range of beautiful personalised prints, you can find something completely bespoke for the happy couple and win "most loved gift".

Everyone has something to say about the Dad in their family– his amazing burger grilling skills – his slightly dodgy musical tastes – his love of travelling and of course his love for his kids.

Boy can they be infuriating to buy for though! Sometimes they are a bit guilty of the “when they want it they just buy it” syndrome, which is fantastic for that sense of achievement, but doesn’t help us when compiling a list of things we could surprise them with. Other times, they simply state “Oh I don’t want anything darling, your love is enough”. Yeah, right. We believe Mum when she says it too, but she still gets a little something on Mothers Day!

Or they’ve got to a certain experienced point in life where they want exactly what they want and anything else is nice, but not lovely. My husband is a prime example of this. He likes one particular coffee supplier in Scotland (The Bean Shop), dark chocolate but only REALLY GOOD dark chocolate, and just a small smattering of very clever American fiction writers. So we know awkward!

If you have a difficult to buy for Dad in your life, then your worries are over! We have the gift solutions you will need to tick all their funny shaped boxes.

For the Rockstar Dad

If your Dad likes his music then we have you covered. Our Personalised Cassette Playlist Print can be personalised with up to 16 of his favourite tracks and has a very cool retro flavour. So whether it’s his favourite driving playlist, or the songs he’s passed on to you that you love just as much now, this will have him rocking in approval.

   

Or if he has just one AMAZING song that he always hums along to, or can’t resist turning up on the radio in the car, then what about our song quote print? We took inspiration from some classic 80s rap, but you can have any song lyrics you choose. They look great in classic black, but if your Pops (see what I did there - pop music? Sorry!) prefers a splash of colour on the walls then we have a great range of background colours to choose from.

      

For the Explorer Dad

Is your Dad’s favourite book his passport? A good friend of ours quite often only knows what country her Dad is in from his Facebook status updates! If exploring and travelling are the thing that lights your Dad’s fire, then he’ll love our worldly gifts.

To capture memories of an amazing place that could be across the other side of the world, or just a few towns away, our amazing abstract map prints are big winners. 

What can we tell you about these awesome personalised maps? Well, we have two versions for a start; a metallic map engraving in gold, copper or silver and a fun and fresh printed version in a selection of colour ways. 

And you can choose whether you want your bespoke map to focus on a small, neighbourhood sized area, or zoom out to look at a larger city or conurbation. So if they have always lived and lived it up in one town, you can celebrate the geographical centre of his world.  

     

For the Hero Dad

But if you really want to tug at the heart strings, we have something a little special up our sleeve. Our family silhouette prints are based on your own photographs of Dad and his mini. We put a thoroughly modern spin on the humble photographic snap and make a piece of modern art that will be loved for many a year. These are exceptional gifts for new Dads and Dads with youngsters - because quite simply the kids are super cute! 

Have a look at the process with this photo to silhouette print transformation. We remove the distracting backgrounds and pick out just the two figures in contrasting colours. Sometimes there will be a small detail such as a hat or hair bow that folks want to include and we can do that too!

The result is a timeless print that will be loved for a lifetime (and conveniently hides the chocolate smeared face or the curse of the blink at shutter moment!)

So, you see, whoever your Dad is - we have him covered!

When is a clock not just a clock? When it’s also a beautiful piece of modern art and a hint at the part of your story that took place in a wonderful location.

Sometimes when we think of a new product, we can turn it around pretty darn quickly. You all know that personalised prints are our core and the beauty of that is that we always have the raw materials to hand; super design skills and fine art paper!

So when we developed our coastline clocks (which use no paper at all - gasp) we had to start at the very beginning and explore all sorts of design ideas, investigate beautiful materials to work with and source the very nicest components.

Let’s start with the design. There’s something quite Dali-esque about our new clocks, with those undulating curves that time itself has carved away from our coastlines. We faithfully recreate all those inlets and bays to capture an important coastal location. It could be the beautiful beaches that you visited on your honeymoon, or the familiar seaside town you had fish and chips at with your family as a kid. Whichever stretch of coastline you like, we can recreate it for you.

Then we started to investigate all the beautiful woods that exist out there. Oh my! I can tell you I spent ages pawing over all the different colours and veneers and textures and smells – yes of course smells! With woods like Eucalyptus, Cedar and Pine the aromas in the studio were just divine.

For our coastline clock bases we use veneers over an MDF core for reasons of stability and practicality. You just cannot buy sheets of thin wood in a solid wood, for one main reason, they warp like crazy! So if you wanted an actual Dali clock, then with solid wood you’d have one pretty quickly! So, completely solid wood is just not an option. This is not bad news at all, quite the contrary.

For a start, with veneers you only use a thin slice of the wood, around 2mm. So that one beautiful tree is used extremely economically and responsibly. Our wood suppliers understand this very well and we were super impressed with their excellent environmental values.

Once we had chosen a selection of amazing wood types, we then had to see how well each one engraved. As all trees have different properties, they all engrave slightly differently. We had to be able to achieve something that was legible and a pleasing colour. For this part of the process we use our super funky Trotec 300 laser engraver, creating a permanent mark in the wood. We had to turn down some gorgeous varieties of wood just because of the way the engraving came out, but that still left us with a solid range of 6 utterly perfect woods.

Now, onto the acrylic detailing. You would be forgiven for thinking that acrylic is acrylic and there isn’t much to say about it. And when it comes to acrylic that you can cut on our hero of a laser cutter, that’s mostly true.  But guess what? We found something sleeker, smoother, and altogether sexier. It doesn’t scratch like the standard acrylic is prone to, and the colours, oh the colours, be still my beating heart! Safe to say we fell in love with it a little more than is strictly “normal”. And the juxtaposition of that smooth man made surface against the grainy patination of the natural wood was exactly the contrast we were after.

Form was now well and truly taken care of. Now we started to look at function. And I’m not suggesting that was the right order to go about it, but what can I say, we’re artists first and foremost.

Would a clock that depicted a coastline make a ticking noise? Well, possibly. We’ve already talked about the very fact that our physical coastlines are carved by the ravages of time and tide, and that certainly isn’t a quiet event. But when we looked at why you would want to recall a coastline, at the events that become a part of your story there, we concluded that ultimately coastlines are wistful and dreamlike. Magical things happen there like engagements, weddings (dare we say conceptions?) and of course the everyday magic of just having fun with loved ones. Peaceful things happen there like solitary walks in and out of the surf, meditative stone tower building, dozing in the sun with a paperback. None of these things said loud, annoying ticking.

Therefore we selected clock mechanisms with no ticking noise, rather a smooth constant rolling around of the second hand reminiscent of gentle rolling waves.

All in all, we’re delighted with the results. I hope you will be too.

To buy our new coastline clock, please click here. And the best news is it's on an introductory offer until the end of May = £60 instead of the normal £70.

We love our prints, we think they're funky!

Since the very first days of Betsy Benn way back in the cold and snowy winter of 2010 (nearly five years ago now!!) I've been creating and designing more and more lovely things and we've kept on growing and getting busier every year. I've been extremely fortunate that you, my lovely and incredibly clever customers, like what we do and keep returning and that some of you must tell your friends as well! Our very own "story of us" hasn't really changed very much in those five years. We've moved offices (twice) as we've got bigger, we have more Betsy's who help me design and create and make the beautiful prints and gifts we sell, and we eat more brownies and slurp more hot chocolate as a result. But the essence of what Betsy Benn is and does hasn't really changed, and I think that's a good thing. If you order a personalised print from us at Betsy Benn, we don't wave a magic wand. We don't have a whizzy thingamajig that "designs" your print as you type your life and memories into the computer screen that then gets automatically printed and posted without anyone looking at it. We have something that we think is more important, and that something makes your print or gift special to us as well. We have our lovely people who work here at Betsy Benn. Our personalised prints and gifts are created the same way we've always done them (just with more Betsy's!). Each personalised order is received and a designer makes a decision about what looks and fits best. Simples! This means that when something leaves here on its way to you we know it's been created with your approval and our design and material quality.   

 

The Betsy Benn Personalised Print Process of Perfection.

Step 1

We receive the lovely news that someone (possibly you) has placed an order. They ensure the required number of digestives are in stock.

Step 2

One of our brilliant graphic designers picks up the order and then checks all the details are present and correct. They will contact you with any queries.

Step 3

Our designer creates your design 'proof' and it's sent back to you to check, change your mind, have a cup of tea, check again, change your mind again and then let us know what you'd like us to do - print or make changes.

Step 4

Repeat step 3 until you are happy. We reserve the right to order more supplies of digestives, brownies or chocolate if any of these run low during step 3. It has no effect on the brilliance of your print, but it keeps us happy.

Step 5

Having agreed that you are happy with the design of your choosing and the way we've designed it we ask another Betsy (probably one of the brilliant Rachel Betsy's) to create your/our design using only the best materials available to us. This process may also involve the consumption of confectionery.

Step 6

Your perfect print or present is carefully rolled and/or wrapped and/or safely placed in a protective cardboard tube or box for our very lovely courier or postie to come and collect it from Betsy Benn towers in Cheltenham.

Step 7

You receive your item and hopefully are so happy with the finished result that you email us, call us or even better, leave a review on the website. Then you could always tell all of your friends and their friends via telegram, carrier pigeon or telephone or even through word of mouth about how brilliant and beautiful your purchase is. Or even better you could use the miracle mediums of technology that are email and Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and all of the other social sites to tell the world about a cake and baked goods obsessive company that creates the most ingenious personalised prints and unique gifts and whose customer service is brilliant and whose products are perfection and whose name is Betsy Benn.

Step 8

If your Betsy Benn purchase was for you and you alone, then, apart from basking in the warmth of the compliments of friends and family who see your print / gift when they visit, you can ignore this step. If your Betsy Benn purchase was for a loved one, a close friend, a family member, a complete stranger or the person who delivers your confectionery supplies, then Step 8 is the most important step. Step 8 is the giving of the gift and capturing the look of joy and gratitude on the recipients face as a treasured memory for ever. Your work here is done. So, if you want to order a personalised print or a unique gift, a personalised letter from Santa tag, pick up some Christmas cards or fancy a lovely mug or even a tea towel, then you can do so in the knowledge that we've created your choice with the same care and attention to detail and personal touch that we would expect if we were buying something ourselves. If we didn't do this, then we would know that the laws of biscuit dunkability karma state our hob knobs will always break and sink to the bottom of the hot chocolate with nary a tea spoon in sight. No one could or should live with that kind of pressure. So, we wish you, and anyone lucky enough to receive a Betsy Benn created Christmas gift, glad tidings of the season! Although we love Christmas with all our heart, we'll have to resist the temptation to indulge in the Christmas spirit ourselves until after we close the doors on last posting day! We wish you a merry Christmas and a very happy and peaceful new year. Betsy xx [caption id="attachment_683" align="alignleft" width="225" class=" "] Betsy Benn meets Monty the Penguin[/caption]