Before You Order an Engraved Piece: Spelling, Character Limits and Final Sale
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 you pay, and — the part most shops leave vague — exactly where final sale stops and our responsibility starts. Every number below is from our own personalised jewellery range, 126 designs from NZ$68.90.
Engraving is not a form field, it is a cutting instruction
When you type into a personalisation box on a product page, you are not writing a note to a person. You are writing the instruction that goes to the bench. The characters you enter are reproduced as entered — the spelling, the capital letters, the spaces, the full stop you left on the end. Nobody rewrites sarah as Sarah, because we have no way of knowing whether the lower case was the point.
That cuts both ways, and it is worth being blunt about the limits of it. There is no on-screen rendering of your name in the finished lettering, on our pages or on most others. What the field gives you is the text itself, exactly as it will be cut. So the proofread is genuinely yours to do, and reading it back once out loud before you pay is the whole trick.
The lettering style is part of the design rather than a choice at checkout — across our personalised range only a handful of designs put the style in your hands. If a particular script is the reason you like a piece, you are choosing the design, not a setting.
Every text field has a character limit, and it is printed on the page
Letters have to physically fit the metal, so each engraving field carries a fixed limit. You do not have to guess it: the limit is written next to the field label as (max 10 characters), and the box stops accepting input when you reach it. If your text disappears halfway through, nothing is broken — you have hit the ceiling for that design.
As a rule of thumb, a name field is usually 8 or 10 characters, and a back or inside message field runs longer, often around 25. Spaces count. So do apostrophes and hyphens, which is how Anne-Marie quietly becomes ten characters rather than nine. Long names, double-barrelled names and te reo names with macrons are the ones worth counting before you fall for a design rather than after.
Fields marked with an asterisk have to be filled in; optional ones can be left blank, and blank means nothing gets engraved there. A design that offers extra name fields will show any added cost beside that field's label, so the price on screen keeps up with what you are adding.
The five-minute proofread that prevents most complaints
Run this before you pay, not after. It reads as fussy written down and takes about as long as making a cup of tea.
Spelling of every proper noun. Do not trust your own memory of how a partner's mother spells Kathryn. Find it written down — a message, a card, a contact entry — and copy it across character by character. Names are where the errors are, because they are the words autocorrect cannot help you with.
Capitalisation and spacing. Decide deliberately between ANNA, Anna and anna, and check you have not left a trailing space or a double space between two words. A stray space at the start of a field shifts the whole engraving off centre.
The order of the names. On a multi-name design, field one is not automatically the eldest, the closest or the first alphabetically — it is whatever you typed in it, in that position on the finished piece. Read the fields top to bottom and picture the pendant.
The field the text landed in. Copy and paste across a form is how a date ends up in the name box. One last look at the whole block before checkout catches it.
Dates, initials, coordinates and short messages
Anything that is not a name has a format decision hiding inside it, and the format is yours, not ours. A date typed as 04/09/2026 will be engraved as 04/09/2026. We will not convert it to the New Zealand day-month order, or to the American month-day order, or spell out the month — so pick the form you want to look at in ten years and type that. 4 Sept 2026 and 04.09.26 are both perfectly good; the only wrong answer is the one you did not mean.
Coordinates need the same care, and they need the degree symbol and the compass letters if you want them. Copy them from the map app rather than typing them from memory, then count the characters — coordinates are long and are one of the few things that regularly does not fit.
Initials raise their own question: two-letter monograms are sometimes set in traditional order, with the surname initial in the middle and larger. If that is the convention you want, type the letters in the order you want them cut and do not assume the workshop will rearrange them. Short messages work best under the limit rather than at it — Always, Mum lands better than a sentence squeezed to the last character. Our engraved necklaces and engraved bracelets both list their fields on the individual product pages.
Photo uploads work differently from text
Uploaded photos are the one part of the process you can genuinely see before you order. Upload an image on the product page and an on-screen editor opens: you drag, zoom and rotate the picture inside the frame until the face sits where you want it. That positioning is saved with the order. Every photo is also checked by a person here before production, and we get in touch if the image is too small or too dark to reproduce at pendant size rather than making it anyway.
The photo also goes in at our end, not yours. On a photo locket — 33 designs from NZ$86.90, all of which take an upload — the image is fitted and set into the locket in the workshop before it ships. You are not sent an empty locket and left to print, trim and press a photo into the frame yourself. The same is true of the 27 projection necklaces from NZ$68.90, where the image is set into the lens.
| Engraved text | Uploaded photo | |
|---|---|---|
| What you give us | Characters typed into a field | An image file from your phone or computer |
| What the page shows you | The characters themselves, plus the remaining count | An editor to drag, zoom and rotate inside the frame |
| The hard limit | Character count fixed by the design | Resolution and framing of the picture you upload |
| Who checks it | You. It is cut as typed | You position it; we check it is usable before production |
| After checkout | Locked once the piece is cut | Contact us quickly — before production we can often swap the file |
Why personalised pieces are final sale
A personalised piece cannot go back into stock. Nobody else wants a pendant with your children's names on it, so there is no second buyer and no shelf to return it to. That is why engraved and photo pieces are final sale here and effectively everywhere else — it is not a loophole, it is the arithmetic of one-off manufacture.
Saying so plainly matters more than burying it. If a shop implies you can send a custom piece back on a change of mind, one of two things is true: they are absorbing a loss they have quietly priced in, or the conversation gets difficult later. We would rather you read the sentence now: once a piece has been made with your text or your photo on it, changing your mind is not a return we can accept.
What that does not cover is anything that went wrong at our end. Final sale is about your preferences changing, not about us getting it wrong, and the two get conflated far too often.
When the mistake is ours, not yours
Here is the line, written out, so you can hold us to it. If the fault is on our side you are not out of pocket — including the postage to send the piece back.
| What happened | What we do | Return postage |
|---|---|---|
| Wrong item or wrong design arrived | Free remake or a full refund, your choice | We pay |
| Arrived damaged, bent or misshapen | Free remake or a full refund, your choice | We pay |
| Engraving does not match what your order says | Free remake or a full refund, your choice | We pay |
| Engraving matches your order, but the text you typed had a typo | Final sale — write to us anyway and we will tell you honestly what a remake costs | Not applicable |
| Non-personalised item, changed your mind | Return within 60 days of receiving it for 80% of the item price, or exchange with no deduction (not moss agate or moissanite) | See the returns page |
None of this replaces what New Zealand law already gives you. Nothing in our policy limits your rights under the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 — goods being of acceptable quality, matching their description and being fit for purpose. Those guarantees sit underneath the policy above, not inside it, and we would rather say so than let a returns page read as though it were the whole story.
Not everything here is personalised
Worth knowing before you assume every custom-order rule applies to your basket: a design with no personalisation fields is not a custom order at all. The clearest example is our moss agate engagement rings — 44 designs from NZ$145.90, none of which carry an engraving or photo field. They are ordinary stock pieces, dispatched within 2–3 business days; the one exception is returns: because every moss agate is one of a kind, change-of-mind returns and exchanges aren't accepted once dispatched, while the 60-day quality guarantee applies as normal.
Elsewhere it is a mix within the same collection, and the product page is the only reliable guide. Of the 71 designs in personalised necklaces from NZ$74.90, 47 take engraved text and 43 take a photo upload — overlapping, because some do both. Of the 36 couple bracelets from NZ$68.90, 22 take engraving and 14 take a photo. If a page has no personalisation fields, you are buying it as shown, and the standard returns window is yours.
The corollary is the useful one: if you want something engraved and the page offers no field for it, we cannot add engraving by email afterwards. Pick a design that has the field. Our name necklaces and initial necklaces are the obvious starting points if lettering is the whole point of the gift.
Give yourself time so you are not proofreading in a hurry
Nearly every engraving error we see was typed by somebody in a rush. Ordering with a fortnight in hand does more for accuracy than any checklist, simply because you are not filling in the fields with one thumb on a bus.
Delivery within New Zealand takes 7–12 business days and every parcel is tracked; the tracking number is emailed the moment your order leaves us. Standard delivery is NZ$14.90, and orders over NZ$179 ship free. Full detail is on the delivery page.
If you are unsure about anything before you order — whether a name fits, whether a photo is sharp enough, whether a design takes engraving at all — ask us first. That conversation is free and takes a day. A remake is neither.
FAQ
Can I change my engraving after I have paid?
Write to us straight away. If the piece has not been cut yet we can usually update the text, and the sooner you reach us the better the odds. Once it is engraved the text is permanent, which is why the field on the product page is the moment that counts.
How many characters can I have engraved?
It depends on the design, and the number is printed beside the field as (max N characters). Name fields are usually 8 or 10 characters and message fields run longer, often around 25. Spaces, hyphens and apostrophes all count towards the total.
Can I see what my name will look like on the piece before I order?
Not as a rendered image. The field shows you the exact characters that will be cut, and that is what you should check — spelling, capital letters and spacing. Uploaded photos are different: those open an on-screen editor where you position the image inside the frame yourself.
Can I return a personalised piece if I typed the name wrong?
Personalised pieces are final sale, so a typo in what you submitted is not something we can refund. Do get in touch regardless — we will tell you plainly what a remake would cost rather than leave you with an unwearable piece.
What if the engraving does not match my order?
Then it is our error and it is on us: a free remake or a full refund, whichever you prefer, and we cover the return postage. The same applies if the piece arrives damaged or the wrong item was sent.
Do I need to print and cut the photo for a locket myself?
No. You upload the image on the product page and position it in the editor, a person here checks it is usable, and we fit it into the locket before it ships. It arrives ready to wear.