What Yofair makes, and who it is for

Yofair puts one name on a thing that gets used, and has done since 2018. Six shelves: the nameplate necklaces, the bracelets and anklets, the rings and hoops, the printed blankets, the travel cases and wash bags, and the presents with a photograph on them. What holds them together is not a look but a decision: every card starts with what the piece is made of and how large it comes, because those are the two things a photograph is worst at settling and the two that decide whether a present lands.

The second look

A present with a name on it is judged twice. The first time is across a table, in about two seconds, while somebody works out the letters: and that is a question about the cut of the script, not about the metal. The second time is three months later, when the plating has been through a coat sleeve and the blanket has been through four washes. Most of what this range gets right is aimed at the second look: nameplates cut from one sheet so the letters hold each other up, blanket printing on one face so the back stays plain fleece, a case stiff enough that a chain does not come out of it in a knot.

The rest of it is arithmetic that somebody has to do before the parcel arrives, and would rather do before the order. A nameplate is ten millimetres tall whatever is cut into it and takes up to fifteen characters, so a ten-letter name is a wider pendant than a six-letter one and hangs differently. A blanket at thirty by forty inches is a lap rug, and ordering it for a double bed is the most common disappointment in this category. A photograph that fills a phone screen is about to be printed two and a half feet across. Those figures belong on the card, not in the small print, and that is where we put them.

What we make

The necklace shelf is the one this catalogue is known for: cursive plates cut from a single sheet, bubble letters that stand apart and read further off, an Arabic plate cut right to left, a plate with a heart at the tail of the name, a birth flower standing beside it, and a slim engraved bar for the date or the coordinates a plate cannot hold. The bracelets carry the same cursive plate along a fine chain rather than hanging from it, with nothing beside the name, one heart, a run of hearts or a blue evil eye; the men's piece is a braided leather cord worn in three wraps, carrying two to eight engraved steel beads. The small shelf is a sterling silver ring with the name curved round the band, hoops with the name cut inside the circle, and a beaded chain that holds a pair of glasses.

The other half of the range is printed rather than cut. Flannel and fleece blankets take a name repeated across the cloth, a single photograph, or a grid of up to ten, in four rectangles from thirty by forty inches to sixty by eighty. The cases are faux leather squares 3.9 inches each way with a name and a birth flower on the lid, three necklace hooks and six ring slots inside, and they are bought six at a time by wedding parties; the wash bags are seersucker cotton in two sizes, embroidered rather than printed. The photograph shelf is face socks, where a face is cut out and repeated round the foot, and small framed canvases at ten by eight and twelve by eight inches.

Who it is for

You, if you are buying for somebody else and there is a date on it. That is nearly everybody who arrives here: a mother whose children's names go on one plate, a bridesmaid list of six, a father who says he wants nothing, a teenager whose blanket has to survive a shared house. The pages are written for that arrival: the character limit and the rectangle sit at the top of a card, and the styling sits further down.

The people who decide these things appear on the front page as four decisions rather than four names: how a name is cut, what each shelf is made of, what sizes are offered, and who reads the letters when one of those is wrong on a page. There are no portraits, because a portrait on a page like this is a stock photograph, and no head count, because the count would be a story.

What we will and will not say

A card describes a piece: what it is made of, what is plated over it, how large it is, how many letters or photographs it takes, and what it costs. What a metal will do on your skin is not something a shop can know, and this one does not guess. The words that arrive printed on jewelry packets in this category (hypoallergenic, nickel-free) are the manufacturer's and stay the manufacturer's; where a page raises the question it links the American Academy of Dermatology on nickel, the federal jewelry guides on what "gold plated" and "sterling silver" are allowed to mean, the American Academy of Pediatrics on where a baby's blanket does and does not belong, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission on lead in children's products.

The one checkable thing we state about ourselves is the year, 2018. Everything else worth knowing about a piece is on its card, and how the figures on those cards are kept current is set out on how we update the catalogue.