Birthday ears

A birthday is the easiest brief we get

Most custom requests start with a picture. Birthday ones start with a person — their colour, their thing, the joke only their family gets — and that's a far better place to begin.

Tell us three things about them and we can usually design from that alone.

Birthdays in the parks

If the birthday is happening on a trip, the ears do a specific job: they announce it. Staff notice, strangers notice, and the day fills up with small unprompted kindnesses from people who spotted them across a queue.

That's worth designing for. Something legible from a distance beats something intricate and subtle — big bow, strong colour, or the age worked in large enough to read at ten feet.

Milestones

• A first birthday. Light, soft, no crystals or wire, scaled small. It photographs better than anything else we make, mostly because of who's wearing it.
• A childhood favourite. The years where they have one specific obsession and want the whole world to know. Lean all the way in.
• Sixteen, eighteen, twenty-one. This is where velvet and pearls beat sequins. Grown-up without being serious — look at the pearl collection.
• Thirty, forty, fifty. Frequently the best orders we get, because by then people have stopped pretending they don't want the ears.

Ordering as a surprise

Roughly half of birthday orders are gifts, and it works fine. What we need:

• Their favourite colour — the real one, not the safe one
• Roughly their age, so we scale it right
• One thing they love. A film, an animal, a place, a running joke.
• The date you need it by, with a little room

You don't need their head measurement. The standard band fits most people from about eight upward, and the sizing guide covers the exceptions.

Designs that already work as birthday pairs

If a custom build is more than you need, several existing designs make excellent birthday ears straight off the shelf — the princess collection for a childhood favourite, the light-up pairs for an evening celebration, and the pearl collection for a milestone that wants understating.

Design a birthday pair →