Most cufflinks are chosen from a tray. These are made from whatever you bring. The design process is short enough to do on a phone during a lunch break, and flexible enough to handle anything from a child's crayon drawing to a crisp company badge.
You Design It, the Preview Shows It
Everything happens on one screen. Upload an image and it sits on both cufflinks of the pair, which have a polished, silver-coloured finish. Drag the picture to move it and zoom to change how much of it fills the face. If it isn't working, upload something else and compare.
What you see in the preview is how your design will be printed, so there's no waiting for somebody else's interpretation of your idea. You can experiment as much as you like, too: tight crop against wide, colour against black and white, three candidate photos in a row. Nothing is committed until it's in your basket.
Why the Square Shape Suits a Picture
Our cufflinks are square, and that's a deliberate advantage for personalised designs. Most photos are rectangles, and a square keeps far more of a picture than a round face does, because nothing is lost to curved edges. Corners stay in, lettering sits on straight lines, and monograms and crests have a natural frame.
Square personalised cufflinks also look quietly modern. With a crisp white shirt and a dark suit they read as formal; with an open collar and a tweed jacket they feel relaxed. The shape suits black tie as easily as a Friday in the office.
Composing an Image for a Square Face
A few habits make the difference between a good design and a great one:
- Crop to the subject. A face, a logo or a single object should fill most of the square. Wide landscapes rarely survive at this size.
- Mind the top and bottom of portrait photos. A tall phone photo will be trimmed to a square, so zoom and drag until the important part sits in the middle.
- Keep text short and bold. Two or three words in a strong typeface read clearly. Thin script fonts can fill in when printed small.
- Leave a margin. Keep anything important slightly away from the edges.
- Use the original file. We print from the full-resolution image you upload, so avoid screenshots and pictures that have been compressed by a messaging app.
Ideas Worth Uploading
If the upload button has you stumped, some starting points:
- A child's drawing of Dad, photographed flat in daylight
- The boat, car or motorbike that gets more polish than anything else he owns
- A line of handwriting from an old birthday card
- A postcode, map pin or coordinates for the place you met
- A band logo from the first gig you went to together
- A family crest or a monogram of his initials
- The dog, looking suitably noble
Designs with strong shapes and clear contrast tend to look best on a square face, because the eye picks them out from across a room.
Logos, Crests and Other People's Artwork
Company logos, club badges, school crests and regimental emblems all sit well on a square face. The one condition is that you own the artwork or have permission to use it; if we can't print a design lawfully, we may decline it. For your own drawings, photos and lettering, there's nothing to check.
When you do use a logo, ask for the original file from whoever designed it. A crisp vector or high-resolution image will keep its edges sharp, whereas a small graphic copied from a website can look fuzzy once it's printed.
Who Wears a Design-Your-Own Pair
The short answer is anyone who wears double cuffs, and plenty of people who have only just started. A personalised pair is a favourite gift for fathers, grandfathers and husbands, but people also design them for themselves: a pair with their own initials for interviews, one with the family boat for sailing club dinners, one with a band logo for weddings where nobody will notice until the dancing starts. Because each pair is a single design, it's easy to build a small collection over time, one for each side of his life.
Women who wear French cuffs order them too, and they make a neat finishing touch for anyone in a formal uniform or a dinner suit.
One Pair or a Whole Batch
A single pair is £40 with shipping included, and two to four pairs are £40 each. Order five or more pairs in total and every pair is £15, with one £5 shipping charge for the order: five pairs are £80, ten are £155 and fifty are £755. There are no further tiers; the price stays at £15 a pair however many you need.
The basket counts pairs across designs. That means five identical pairs for a team, five completely different pairs for five different people, or any mix in between all reach the £15 price. Each pair carries one image on both cufflinks, so different designs are simply different pairs.
Checkout is secure, and every pair is made in our Cornwall workshop and sent out in its own gift box, ready to give.