How Personalisation Works

What Personalisation Means Here

At Heavenly Paws, personalisation isn’t just dropping a name into a template. It’s how a beautiful keepsake becomes *their* keepsake — the one that brings your girl or your boy to mind the moment someone sees it. Every gift in our range has been designed with personalisation at its heart, which means the layouts, fonts, and proportions have all been chosen to make your words and photos look their very best.

Personalisation is handled by our small in-house team. Real people read every order. That matters, and it’s worth keeping in mind as you go through this guide.

The Types of Personalisation We Offer

Depending on the gift, you’ll find some or all of the following options available.

Engraved or printed text is the most common type — a name, a date, a short message. Most of our Dog Memorial Keepsakes use this, and the character limits vary by product. You’ll find the exact limits listed on each product page.

Photo upload is available on our Dog Memorial Photo Gifts range. You submit a photo of your dog and we create a custom illustration or print from it. The quality of the photo you send has a direct impact on the quality of the finished gift — more on that below.

Breed selection appears on products where we’ve created individual illustrations for over 30 breeds. You choose your dog’s breed from a dropdown and we apply the right illustration to your keepsake. If your dog is a mix or their breed isn’t listed, get in touch via Contact Us and we’ll do our best to find the closest match.

Date fields let you add significant dates — when they were born, when you said goodbye, or both. Some products have a single date field; others have two separate lines. Each product page explains what fits where.

Character Limits — How to Work Within Them

Character limits exist because the design has to hold together. A name field might allow up to 12 characters; a message line might allow 25. Spaces and punctuation count.

Before you order, it’s worth counting your characters out. A name like “Bartholomew” (12 characters exactly) fits where a limit is 12; “Bartholomew James” does not. If a name is longer than the limit allows, most customers shorten to a nickname — the name their dog actually answered to, which is usually the right call anyway.

For message lines, less is almost always more. Short phrases carry more weight than long ones when the space is small. “Forever in my heart” lands harder than a full sentence that has to be set in a tiny font to fit.

Photo Quality — What Makes a Photo Work

If you’re ordering a photo gift, this section matters more than any other.

The best photos for memorial gifts are sharp, well-lit, and show your dog’s face clearly. A photo taken outdoors in natural light, where your dog is the main subject and the background isn’t too busy, will give us the most to work with. Portrait-orientation photos tend to suit our designs better than landscape, though we can usually work with either.

What doesn’t work well: heavily filtered images, very dark or very blurry photos, and photos where your dog is at a distance or partially obscured. Screenshots of screenshots, or images that have been compressed repeatedly by social media, lose the resolution we need to produce a clean result.

As a rough guide, aim for an image that’s at least 1,000 pixels on its shortest side. If you’re sending a photo from a modern smartphone taken in the last five years, it’s almost certainly high enough resolution. If you’re working from an older print that you’ve scanned, the quality of that scan is what we work from — so a high-quality scan at 300dpi or above will give us the best result.

We’ll always tell you honestly if a photo isn’t going to work well before we proceed.

What to Write — Ideas for Names, Dates, and Messages

This is where people often pause longest, and it’s completely understandable. Here are a few approaches that tend to work well.

Names: Use the name you actually called them. Not “Maximilian” if everyone said “Max.” Not “Princess Fluffington” unless that was genuinely what you shouted across the park.

Dates: See the section below — there’s more on this specifically.

Short messages: Some of the most-used phrases on our gifts include “Always in our hearts,” “Good boy forever,” “The best of us,” “Every walk, every wag,” and simply “Loved beyond words.” Don’t feel you need to be original — a phrase that’s true is worth more than a phrase that’s clever.

Two-line messages: If you have two lines available, some customers use them for a paired thought — “Every walk, every wag” on line one and “2011–2023” on line two. Others use both lines for a longer message split across them. Either works.

How to Decide on Dates

This is a genuinely personal decision and there’s no right answer, so we’ll just lay out the options clearly.

Full dates (e.g. 14 March 2012 – 7 September 2023) are meaningful if precision feels important to you, or if this gift is partly for other people — children, or family — for whom those specific dates will matter.

Years only (e.g. 2012–2023) is the most common choice on our gifts. It’s clean, it reads well, and for most people it captures everything that needs to be captured.

No dates is a completely valid option. Some people find dates make a gift feel more like a memorial and less like a celebration of a life. If you’d rather just have their name and a message, that’s exactly what the gift should have.

A few customers add their dog’s birthday only — not the date they said goodbye. That’s a lovely way to keep the emphasis on the life rather than the ending.

How the Proofing Process Works

Every personalised order at Heavenly Paws goes through a manual proof check before it goes into production. A member of our team reviews the text you’ve entered against the product’s layout, checks that nothing looks off, and flags anything that seems like it might be a mistake — a name in all lower case when the field expects title case, a date entered in an unusual format, a message that’s been cut off by the character limit.

For photo gifts, we’ll review your image and confirm it’s suitable before we begin. If we have any concerns about resolution or composition, we’ll contact you — usually within one working day — before anything is produced.

We’ll always send a digital proof for photo-based personalised gifts so you can see exactly how it looks before we print. For text-only personalisation, you receive a confirmation showing exactly what you’ve entered, and production begins once you’ve had a chance to review it.

Common Mistakes — and How to Avoid Them

A few things come up regularly enough that they’re worth mentioning directly.

Capitalisation matters. What you type is what appears. If you enter “max” in lower case, that’s how the name will be engraved or printed unless our team flags it. Double-check your capitalisation before you submit.

Dates entered in the wrong field. On products with two date fields (birth and death, or start and end), it’s easy to enter them the wrong way around when you’re upset or in a hurry. Read the field labels carefully.

Too much text. We have customers who want to include a full verse in a 20-character message field. We’ll always tell you if what you’ve entered doesn’t fit, but saving yourself that back-and-forth means deciding on your short version before you start.

Sending the wrong photo. A few customers accidentally upload a photo of another dog, or the wrong version of a photo. Take a moment to confirm the file name before you submit.

A Note on Typos

Here is the honest version: once a personalised gift has gone into production, we aren’t able to remake it without charge if the text was entered correctly by you and approved correctly by us. This is true of nearly every personalisation business, and it’s worth being aware of before you order.

That’s why our proofing step exists — it’s specifically to catch mistakes before they become permanent. If you spot a typo after placing your order but before you’ve received a proof or confirmation, contact us straight away via Contact Us. The sooner you get in touch, the more likely we are to be able to catch it.

If a typo is the result of an error on our end — we entered something differently to what you submitted — we will of course remake the gift at no cost to you. We stand behind every order we send out, and you can read more about that on Our Promise.

We want your keepsake to be right. That’s the whole point.