IfShe Journal

Two necklaces can look identical in a photograph and behave completely differently after six months of being worn. One keeps its shine and needs nothing. One darkens in the folds of the chain. One leaves a faint green mark on the back of a neck in a Northland summer. The difference is almost never the photograph. It is the metal underneath, and whether the product page told you what it was. This guide is about reading that line: what the common words mean, what happens to the metals over time, and — because it would be strange to write this...

Almost every gift guide you read online was written for the northern half of the world. It puts Mother's Day in March, Father's Day in June, and Christmas in mid-winter. Two of those dates are simply wrong for New Zealand, and the third is upside down. For anything personalised the mismatch costs real time, because a piece with a name or a photo on it is made after you order it, and then it travels. This guide sets out the dates that apply here, what each season does to the sort of piece worth choosing, and how to count backwards...

Ordering a personalised necklace from an overseas store raises questions that walking into a shop on Ponsonby Road never does. How long does it really take. Does anything get charged at the border. Why is there no GST line on the order. And if the engraving comes back spelled wrong, whose problem is that. This page answers those four questions for orders placed on this store, using the same figures our own policy pages use. Where a rule is set by the New Zealand government rather than by us, we say so and quote the condition attached to it rather...

An engraved piece is one of the few things you can buy where the shop cannot fix your typo. A ring can be resized, a chain shortened, a gift box swapped. A pendant cut to read Cathrine will read Cathrine for the rest of its life. That single fact is behind almost every unhappy custom order, ours included, and almost all of it is avoidable in about five minutes at the checkout. So this is the ordering guide rather than the styling guide. What actually happens to the letters you type, where the character limit lives, what to check before...