A personalized piece cannot be restocked, returned, or resold. Whatever is typed into the order box is what gets cut, engraved, or printed, and then it belongs to exactly one family forever. That is the whole appeal, and it is also why the five minutes before you submit an order matter more than they do anywhere else in online shopping.
These are the five things that account for nearly every corrected order we handle. None of them are complicated. All of them are easy to skip when you are ordering at eleven at night.
1. The spelling, copied from something they wrote
Do not type the name from memory. Find a text, an email signature, a wedding invitation, anything they wrote themselves, and copy it exactly.
The specific traps: capital letters inside surnames, where McKenzie, Mckenzie, and MacKenzie are three different families. Apostrophes, where O'Brien and OBrien are not the same and autocorrect has opinions. Accented letters, which we can absolutely produce but only if we know they belong there. Hyphenated surnames, where the order is not negotiable to the people who chose it.
We catch obvious typos. We cannot catch a correctly spelled version of the wrong name, because we do not know your family.
2. Which date, and how it should look
Two separate questions and people usually only answer one.
Which date: for an anniversary piece, the wedding date is the default but not always the right one. Couples who were together for years before marrying often want the earlier date. For a new house it is the closing date, not the move-in date. For a star map it is a specific night, and the hour matters, which we cover in what time to use on a star map.
How it looks: 06.09.2024 means two different days depending on which side of the Atlantic the reader is on. If the piece is going to be read by family in more than one country, write the month out. Roman numerals look elegant and are unreadable to about half the people who will see them, which is a fine trade if you make it deliberately.
3. The wall, measured
Measure the actual space with a tape measure. Not the room, the space the piece will occupy, and preferably the furniture underneath it too.
People consistently order too small, and the reason is that a sign looks large on a screen and modest on a wall. The fix is free: cut the dimensions out of newspaper or cardboard, tape the shape where it will hang, and live with it for a day. If it looks about right taped up, order one size larger. Our full guidance is in what size sign you actually need.
4. How your text behaves in the font you picked
Font and text length interact, and the interaction is where most disappointment comes from. A long surname in a delicate script has to shrink to fit the width, and once the strokes get thin enough they stop reading from across a room. Short names can carry any font. Long ones cannot.
If your name runs past about ten characters, look hard at heavier or more open lettering before committing to the prettiest option. We wrote the longer version in choosing a font for a custom sign.
5. The address, especially if it is a surprise
The last one and the most expensive when it goes wrong. If the piece is shipping directly to the recipient, the shipping address is theirs and the billing address is yours, and those fields do not fill themselves in correctly just because you meant them to.
Check apartment numbers, which get dropped constantly, and check that the recipient's name is on the shipping line so a carrier does not return it as undeliverable. If it is a surprise, our piece on ordering as a surprise without the recipient finding out covers the rest.
What happens if you catch a mistake after ordering?
Message us immediately. Everything is made to order, so there is a real window between an order arriving and production starting, and inside that window a correction costs nothing. Once a piece is cut or printed, it is a new piece. That is not a policy we enjoy, it is just what personalization is.
Read your order confirmation the moment it arrives, character by character, while it is still fixable. That single habit prevents more problems than everything else on this list combined.