Presents for Mum? Whether it’s for a Birthday, Christmas, Mothers’ Day or just because she is special, finding the perfect gift for your mum is an important task and one you need to spend some time on. Use our 5 steps to help us to produce a special picture that will show your mum how much you love her and that she will cherish forever.
What makes a brilliant Present for Mum?
They say giving is better than receiving and this is sometimes difficult to get our heads around. But when you give a present that you know the recipient, in this case your mum, you will really appreciate and be able to cherish for a lifetime you can feel really smug and satisfied that you have done the absolute best you can. There is no doubt that Mums are special and if we are honest with ourselves we have to admit to not taking enough time or care to let her know how special we feel she is. When you are looking for presents for mum it is easy to go down the same old routes as before. Flowers always work of course but they only last a few days, and if I am honest you should be buying flowers AND a present to do the job properly.
When I am looking for perfect presents for mum I find that thinking more creatively is the key. I am not saying that you don’t put any thought into what you give at the moment but to help the thought process I decided to write down some tips on how to really think about coming up with that perfect gift idea for your mum.
So finding the ideal gift for your mum involves bringing together four or five key elements that reflect mum’s interests, preferences, memories, experiences and locations and then making it very personal. You might be thinking ‘How do I do that?” but don’t worry, just bear with me on this. All you need to do is fill in the blanks and we will do the rest for you and what you will end up with is something magical.
The blanks that need to be filled in are outlined in the 5 tips below. If you know your mum well this will be easy, but if you have, for example, lived away from home for a while you might need to do a bit of digging to get the right information to work with.
Remember, if something is worth doing it is worth doing well and that is what you are going to do here. So get started with the 5 tips below.
5 Tips for creating Presents for Mum
I had to make it is easy for myself to be honest as I am a simple soul. It took me a while but it all comes down to 5 things. Give these five things your attention and you will not only find brilliant presents for mum but you will have a blueprint for finding the perfect gift for anyone you know.
I have a sort of present or gift toolkit so you plug in the answers to these questions and between us we will come up with ideas for those presents for mum that will blow here away.
Presents for Mum Tip#1 – Interests
Sounds obvious I guess but most people have at least one key area of interest and often it is very close to their hearts.
This might be an animal like their pet dog or cat. People become very attached to their pets and if, say they have a Labrador, they love Labrador stuff. This might be particularly appropriate for slightly older friends or relatives but with the trend in toy or small dogs nowadays people are becoming fanatical about their little pooch and this will lead to considerable interest in anything related to that specific breed.
Or maybe it’s a horse for example if they like riding. What about their car or sport. They might be mad supporters of football or rugby or something else or members of a club for something specific.
They might be mad cyclists, motor bikers, caravanners or sailers for example. They might walk for pleasure, run, do marathons, triathalons, go to the gym, play tennis,
I can’t list everything of course, but you will need to if you want to get inside the options for the perfect present for your friends or family. Try and focus on a key interest, rather than a ‘sort of’ interest as this will have more impact.
Presents for Mum Tip#2 – Memories & Experiences
I used to think that this was just for old people, but since running Gecko Designs I have become awakened to just how much impact memories and experiences have on people’s happiness across the age range. I guess the word ‘memories’ is more appropriate for the older person but they have had experiences, and shared experiences with loved ones so don’t forget that. Often they have not mentioned it to many people and of course be careful of picking the wrong memory.
For example, if Aunty always goes on about the time she went to Paris and how much she loved it, just check it was with Uncle that she went because that might cause some issues! Perhaps your older relative or friend has children who now live away and they don’t see them as often as they would like. Maybe they met at a concert in the 60s and stayed in a VW Camper van on their honeymoon. Anything like that is great fuel for your perfect present workshop.
With younger people though experiences and shared experiences are very powerful images that warrant serious inclusion in the perfect gift thought process. Today life is driven by achievement whether that be having a first child, running a marathon together, the wedding day, going up in a hot air balloon or even buying their first house. These achievements are solid experiences that mean a lot to the person or people involved and are typical ideas that need to be put into the perfect gift melting pot.
Presents for Mum Tip#3 – Preferences
This is where you need to have some pretty good knowledge of what your mum likes. It can be pretty simple to establish though if you think whether she prefers black & white for example. Or homely, country colours like green and brown. Does she love bright colours, pastel or paisley colours and is there a colour theme you can establish?
Notwithstanding this of course, try to mix it up. We often find that combinations that shouldn’t work do work so if your mum’s interest is elephants and her preference is for the colour red, don’t be shy and think – well a red elephant isn’t going to work, but believe me it can. I can tell you, using this example, that one our most popular fabric choices for our range of elephant and elephant family pictures is a red background with gold flowers. Who would ever have thought it!
Presents for Mum Tip#4 – Locations
This is an often forgotten secret to nailing the perfect gift. All you have discovered about memories and experiences above had to happen somewhere. For example my wife and I got engaged in Paris and married on the Greek island of Zante so these are particular locations that mean something to us. Perhaps your mum was born in Scotland and is very proud of her Scottish heritage, she still has family in Newcastle or Birmingham for example. She might have had a memorable experience bungee jumping in New Zealand, or walking the South Coast way. Or perhaps you are the key, where were you born or conceived. Her most important memory might have been going to and graduating from University, but which one? Did she cycle from Lands End to John O’Groats, or run the New York Marathon or did she meet someone famous or special at a concert in a town or city.
You can go a little mad here but most people have one or more very special locations in their lives and it is your talk to find out what they are and how best to match that with the other tips here.
When you think about it everything has to happen SOMEWHERE, and that ‘somewhere’ becomes very important to people and the location becomes a massive part of the visualisation of any memory or experience.
Nearly all the custom gifts we create for people have some indication of location, mostly using maps but sometimes words and often the picture image portrays a location too. So don’t forget this crucial element of finding the perfect gift for someone.
Presents for Mum Tip#5 – Unique, Individual & Original
This is where you start to put it all together but the main aim is to make sure that your gift is Unique, Individual and Original. You might be thinking how the hell can I do that? But never fear there is a way you can create the perfect present and someone can make it for you.
What you need to do now is to bring together all the information you have assembled above, look at the options available and you could be giving a handmade, One-off or limited edition, attractive and extremely poignant gift to your loved one or close friend for their special day.
This is where you have to become a little creative so to help you out I will give you some real examples of actual commissions our customers have asked for to enable them to give that perfect gift.
Examples of actual Presents for Mum we have helped our customers create
It was coming up to last Christmas
and a lady came to our stall wondering if we could help. She was one of three children all grown up and living away. In some cases a long way away like New Zealand. She wanted a creative gift for her mother for Christmas that would mean something very special to her. We took our triple heart cut 0ut and put maps of the current locations of each of the three siblings behind them. The old lady was delighted.
A customer’s mum loves horses and the colour red.
It was a no brainer for this customer. It was his mum’s birthday and he was stressing about what he could get her that was different but something that showed a good level of thought and also would illustrate how much he loved his mum. Our Smart Horse in red with white hearts just hit the spot.
What to get a tennis mad mum in the run up to Wimbledon?
A completely unique tennis racquet and ball cut out backed by padded fabric in Wimbledon colours and with furry green balls. Not something that had initially come to mind for this customer but when he saw it he realised this was the perfect present for his mum.
These are just some examples of how to take your hard creative work and come up with an idea for the perfect personalised gift. In a lot of cases we might be one jump ahead of you. Based on customer feedback and sales we have identified 3-4 fabric choices for each of our designs that are most popular. This does not mean that your perfect picture is not unique because the fabric placement within the picture is never the same twice.
But this does not take away your ability to make your own choices so you always have access to our wide fabric swatches and of course for that absolutely personal picture you can send us your own fabric. Clearly any map based perfect gifts are also unique to you.
So by following the 5 personalisation tips above you should now have an idea distilled in your head of colours, locations, designs etc and anything that will make it special. We take your own creativity, add some of our magic and then we put it all together for you to produce a truly personal picture that will make the perfect gift.
This is the way to do it:
- Choose the cut out design from our online shop that will match your ideas – or contact us for new options
- Select your choice of size (if available) and select your frame preference from the dropdowns
- Select your choice of popular fabric – or select the ‘Custom’ option and then
- Select from our wider swatch of available fabrics – or
- Send us your own fabric
- Make a map choice if this is part of the design (we will be in touch directly to confirm the exact locations)
- For all custom choices complete ‘order notes’ at checkout and we will contact you
- Select your delivery/collection option (only select local collection if you will be collecting from us in Dorchester)
- Pay via Paypal, Debit or Credit Card
- Then it’s over to us
So go to our online shop – Gecko Designs Shop – and get started. Need some more reassurance – have a look at what our delighted customers say.
Please don’t forget to tell everyone you know how easy this is. Use our sharing options to tell everyone you know. We do run competitions and offer seasonal discounts so everyone can benefit from knowing a little more about Gecko Designs.
Thanks for reading and happy gift creating
Tim & Elaine