One glue gun, a printer that jammed, and a shoebox of photographs that belonged to somebody else. The first thing we made was for a friend's parents' twenty-fifth. We did not charge for it, and we got the binding wrong.
What we noticed was not that people liked the object. It was the ten seconds before they opened it — the hesitation, the turning it over, the reading of the label twice. We have spent four years since then designing around those ten seconds.
Everything is still made by hand, by us
Not "handcrafted" in the way a catalogue means it. Cut, printed, bound, lettered and packed at a desk, by the two of us, in the order things come in. This is why we cannot ship the same day, why we say no to orders of fifty, and why every piece takes between seven and twelve days.
It is also why we send you photographs at the halfway point. If something is going wrong, that is when you should find out — not when the box arrives.
Your photographs are probably fine
Almost everyone apologises for their photographs. They are blurry, or dark, or screenshots of a video call, or a photograph of a photograph taken at an angle. We would rather have those than a studio shoot. A bad photograph printed small, in black and white, set into thick paper, stops looking like a bad photograph and starts looking like a memory — which is what it is.
We do not have a shop
There is no cart on this site, and there will not be one for a while. Everything we make involves a conversation — about what goes in, how many pages, whose handwriting. That conversation happens on WhatsApp or over email, and it usually takes two or three messages. This site exists so the conversation can start somewhere past the basics.
Where we send things
We make everything ourselves, so nothing ships the same day. Most pieces take 7 to 12 days from the point we have your photographs, and then 2 to 4 days in transit anywhere in India. If you have a date, tell us the date and we will tell you honestly whether we can make it.
— Memory Studio