The standard party bag is a plastic whistle, a bouncy ball, three sweets and a tattoo that comes off in the bath. Total cost, about four dollars a child. Total survival time, roughly until Sunday night. Everybody knows this and everybody keeps buying them, because the alternative has always been either more expensive or more effort.
A named keyring is the alternative that is only one of those things.
The arithmetic, honestly
A name charm is $16. For a party of eight that is $128, plus nothing for postage because anything over $80 ships free. Up to twenty fit in one envelope, so a bigger party doesn’t cost more to send.
That is four times a party bag. We’re not going to pretend otherwise, and if you are feeding fifteen children it is genuinely a lot of money. Two ways people actually use this:
- The small party. Six or eight children, the ones your child would name if you asked. One good thing each instead of eight bags of filler.
- The favour that replaces the present. Some families now run parties where guests don’t bring gifts. A named charm each, as the thing they take home, works better in that format than it does alongside a pile of presents.
If neither of those is your party, the honest answer is that party bags are cheaper and we are not the right call.
Why a name is the part that matters
Eight identical things get muddled within ten minutes and abandoned within a week. Eight different things, each with one child’s name on it, don’t — not because children are sentimental about printed plastic, but because an object with your own name on it is never ambiguous about whose it is. The same reason named drink bottles come home from school and unnamed ones don’t.
It also solves the other party problem for free: you now have a place card, a party-bag label and a take-home in one object. Put them on the plates before anyone arrives and seating sorts itself out.
What to tell us
Spellings, as the parents spell them. That is the whole brief. Macrons are fine — we print them in every font — and so are names that other sites would have truncated; see macrons, long names, and spelling it the way it is spelt.
What we can’t do is fix a spelling afterwards. The name is fused into the shape of the plate, so the charm is the spelling; there’s no sticker to peel off. Check the invitation list rather than going from memory.
Colours
Ten filament colours, and the letters are a second colour standing 1.8mm proud of the plate. You can do all eight charms in the party’s two colours, or give every child a different plate — it costs the same either way, because the price doesn’t care which spool we load.
One thing to avoid: putting a colour on itself, or two colours that sit close together. Bright blue letters on a purple plate are legible in good light and almost invisible in a hallway. The configurator warns you when a pair is too close; it won’t stop you, because tone-on-tone is a real choice, but on a party favour that is going to live in a bag it is usually the wrong one.
How long to allow
Everything is made to order on a printer in Auckland, one at a time, so these are not pulled off a shelf. We don’t publish a turnaround figure yet, and we’d rather say that than invent one: if you have a date, tell us before you order and we’ll say plainly whether it’s possible. Ordering a fortnight out is comfortable. Ordering on the Thursday for a Saturday is not.
The short version
- $16 each, free postage over $80, up to twenty per envelope
- One name each, spelled the way the parents spell it, macrons included
- Doubles as the place card
- Made to order in Auckland — ask about dates before you commit
- If you need fifteen favours for under fifty dollars, buy party bags