News ·
A big family reunion is a rare thing: thirty or forty people who never see each other all at once, gathered for a summer weekend in a village hall or a garden. And someone — often you — ends up in charge of "finding something to mark the occasion". Here is how to turn an old family photo into items everyone takes home, without losing three evenings or blowing the budget.
Choose the photo first, the rest follows
In every family there is almost always one photo that makes everyone laugh: the grandparents as newlyweds, the holiday house, the siblings lined up against a wall in 1978. That is the one you want, not a nice neutral photo. It tells a story that all forty guests will recognise.
On the technical side, two simple rules. If the photo is old and on paper, scan it rather than photographing it: a 600 dpi scan of a 6 × 4 inch print gives a file that is more than enough for a t-shirt or a frame. If you only have a digital shot, take the original straight from the camera or phone, never the version fished out of a group chat, which has already been recompressed twice. Our page on the resolution needed for a sharp print gives the thresholds by format.
Which item for which purpose
For a reunion, three logics sit well together:
- The t-shirt worn on the day ($29.00): the most spectacular. Forty people in identical t-shirts in the group photo, the effect is immediate. Unisex sizes from S to 2XL.
- The keepsake to take home: the photo mug at $25.00 or the tote bag at $38.00, still in use six months later.
- The set of postcards ($25.00 for 10, A6 on 300 g card): perfect if you want each household to leave with something to post or stick on the fridge, at a very low cost per head.
And if the reunion falls at the end of the year, the 2027 photo calendar (, 14 pages, spiral bound) lets you put a different photo on each month: twelve branches of the family, twelve pages. Note that the month names and public holidays are printed in French.
The volume discount completely changes the sums
This is the point many organisers discover too late. From 10 items in the basket, the discount is 10%; from 25, it rises to 15%. It applies on its own in the basket, with no code to enter.
Two concrete examples: twelve t-shirts go from $348.00 to $313.20. Twenty-five t-shirts come down to $616.25 instead of $725.00. And items add up, even different ones: ten mugs, or five mugs plus five tote bags, cross the same threshold. The page for personalised items in quantity gathers the products concerned.
Two caveats before you do your sums: the three wooden frames and the canvas are excluded from the discount and do not count towards the threshold. If you want to give the grandparents a frame on top of the t-shirts, order it separately, it will not change anything else.
One order, not forty
The temptation is to pass the link around and let everyone order their own t-shirt. Bad idea: nobody reaches the discount threshold, and you end up with forty parcels on forty different dates. Do the opposite.
- One message in the family group with a firm deadline, a week before you order.
- One shared table with two columns: first name, size. That is all. Do not open the debate about the colour.
- You order everything at once, to your address, and hand it out on the day.
Allow one or two spare sizes: there is always a cousin who replies after the deadline.
When to order
We quote 5 to 10 working days in the UK, Europe and the US, up to 15 elsewhere. So count on a week or two, and place your order three weeks before the reunion: one week to collect sizes, one for production and delivery, one of margin for the unexpected. Everything is printed to order in Europe, at the partner site closest to the delivery address, and we ship across the UK, the EU, Switzerland, the US and Canada — handy when part of the family lives in Dublin or Boston.
One thing to bear in mind: as every piece is made from your file, it is exempt from the standard right of withdrawal. Any printing, manufacturing or transport defect, on the other hand, is replaced or refunded.
If you have no usable photo
It happens: the archives are at an aunt's house, or no single image brings everyone together. You can describe what you want in a sentence — the family house as an illustration, grandma's dog as a drawing — and the AI draws it in about ten seconds before placing it on the product. Three free attempts, no account to create: see how to create a design with AI.
The rest takes a few minutes in the online studio: you upload your file, position it on screen, add the family name and the year if you like, and order. No account to create, and your photo does not leave your browser until payment.
