Recycled and recyclable
Every sheet of paper we use is recycled and every part of the box can go back in the bin it came from. No cellophane, no plastic ribbon, no shredded filler that follows you round the flat for a fortnight.
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- About
The people behind the ribbon
Nine of us, one long table on Halden Row, and a standing rule that nothing leaves the studio unless we'd be pleased to receive it ourselves.
How we got here
It began with a friend's wedding and forty rolls of brown paper
In the autumn of 2017 we wrapped ninety wedding favours on a kitchen table in Greenpoint. Somebody asked what we charged. We hadn't given it any thought.
Nine years later there are nine of us and a proper workshop on Halden Row, with a wall of ribbon spools our landlord describes — not unkindly — as a fire risk. The method has barely changed. Choose good things, wrap them slowly, write the note out by hand, and get it on a van the same afternoon.
We still turn down far more than we take on. If we wouldn't be quietly pleased to open it ourselves, it doesn't go in the box, which is why the collection runs to sixteen pieces rather than six hundred. It makes for a smaller catalogue and a considerably better one.
Mara Halden
Founder — still folds the difficult corners
- 12,400 gifts wrapped in the last twelve months alone
- 1,240 five-star reviews and a handful of four-star ones we read twice
- 38 small producers every one of them met in person
- 9 people in the studio plus Biscuit, who supervises from a chair
How we work
Four steps, and none of them rushed
There is no clever machinery involved. It is paper, ribbon, a good pen and somebody paying attention.
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01
You choose
Pick a box, or tell us the person and the budget and we'll put three options in front of you by the next morning.
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02
We wrap by hand
Recycled paper, a mitred corner, and satin ribbon from a family mill in Como. Roughly eleven minutes a box, longer if it's an awkward shape.
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03
Your note, handwritten
Whatever you type at checkout gets copied onto a cotton card in ink. We copy it exactly, spelling and all, because that's usually the point.
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04
Sent the same day
Anything ordered before two goes out that afternoon, tracked and carbon-offset. We'll send you the photograph before it leaves.
What we hold to
Three things we won't negotiate on
Not a manifesto. Just the three arguments we've already had and settled.
Small producers first
Thirty-eight makers, all of them small and all of them met in person — the chocolatier in Red Hook, the candlemaker who works out of a garage in Hudson, the ceramicist we found at a car boot sale in Kent.
Paid properly
Makers are paid in full when the order is placed, not ninety days later, and nobody in the studio is on a zero-hours contract. It costs us a little margin and saves us a great deal of bother.
The studio
Say hello
Nine of us, four of whom will talk to you
If you email us, one of these people replies. Usually within the hour, and never with a ticket number.
Mara Halden
Founder & head wrapperStarted the whole thing on a kitchen table and still folds every corner on the awkward-shaped orders herself.
Idris Vale
SourcingSpends most of the week in a van visiting makers. Has strong opinions on chocolate tempering and will share them freely.
Noor Bexley
Cards & calligraphyWrites roughly two hundred notes a week in an italic hand she taught herself from a library book in 2014.
Tom Rissey
Dispatch & customer careAnswers the inbox, chases the couriers, and is the reason anything reaches you on the day we promised.
Right then
Somebody, somewhere, is due a good box
Sixteen pieces in the collection, all wrapped by hand and out the door by two. Or write to us and we'll build something for the person you have in mind.
- Free wrapping and a handwritten note on every order
- Corporate gifting from ten boxes upwards