Every sculpture we ship starts blank when you place your order. There's no warehouse full of pre-made pieces waiting for names to be engraved. If you order today, the walnut board that will become your sculpture is on a shelf in Hong Kong, unclaimed.
Why we do this the slow way
The obvious reason: personalisation. If we held stock of finished pieces, we'd have to engrave-to-order anyway, which means we'd be shipping half-finished pieces at delivery time. It doesn't save meaningful time.
The less obvious reason: we don't know what we'd hold. Each design has enough personalisation variables (names, date format, optional phrases, wedding vs anniversary vs memorial framing) that a stocked piece would be wrong for most customers.
The philosophical reason: batch production changes what an object means. A piece from a batch is one of many. A piece made specifically for you, from a specific board of walnut, on a specific week, is one of one. The economics are worse. The meaning is different.
What this means for lead time
Standard orders take 5-7 business days from order to shipping. That's board selection, CNC roughing, hand-carving, sanding, burn-engraving, oil finishing, and packing. Add international shipping on top — typically 7-14 more business days depending on destination.
If you need something faster, we sometimes can. There's a rush option available at checkout for time-sensitive orders (imminent anniversary, wedding, funeral). Rush production is 3 business days and costs a small premium. We can't do rush during our busy season (mid-October through mid-December) because the queue is already at capacity.
Why we don't scale
Every year we get asked whether we'll hire more carvers, open a second workshop, or start wholesaling to third-party retailers. The answer is always no, and it's not because we're precious about the craft. It's because we already know what that ends up looking like.
Adding one more pair of hands to a workshop like this changes the product. The person we'd hire wouldn't have the same feel for grain selection, the same tolerance for slow finishing, the same instinct for when a piece needs one more sanding pass. They'd learn eventually, but "eventually" is a couple of years, and in the meantime the pieces would drift from what customers currently expect.
So we've decided to stay one workshop, one pair of hands, one queue. It caps our production at about 30-40 pieces a week. That's the ceiling. If you're ordering, thank you for accepting the pace — it's the pace that keeps this worth doing.