Sunday 4 June 2017

Personalised Father's Day Gifts with Snapfish - A Review

Father's Day is almost here, on the 18th June to be precise and to be honest, I often find myself purchasing the same kind of gift each year for both my dad and my husband. It's not that I can't think of new ideas, but instead I often resort to the firm favourites that I know they will love. For the last few years I have , I mean my kids have, bought their dad Wales Rally GB tickets. My husband goes every year and with the base now being just down the road it is always a welcome gift. However I could easily buy these at any time of the year for him, especially when he has to wait until October to use them and they aren't really something that is 'personal' to him from the children. With regards to my own dad, I often buy him wine or a new shirt to add to his 'Grandad Shirt' collection as my kids call them.

I was therefore delighted to have the opportunity to try something new this year after I was made aware of the company Snapfish. Their website allows you to create fun personalised gifts and cards, which you can design yourself using your favourite and most cherished photographs. This allows you to display your family moments and memories in a wonderful unique way.


Choosing Your Product

Choosing which product I wanted to purchase was probably the hardest part out of the whole process due to there being so much choice. I wanted to pick something that my dad would use, but also something that I could add numerous images to. The website was really easy to navigate and after selecting the Father's Day section from the contents, I was taken to a page full of gift ideas. The products ranged from mugs to cushions, keyrings to mousemats and phone cases to calendars to name a few. After a good browse through the choices, I decided to purchase a mug for both my dad and my husband, as well as a Personalised Table-Top Panel for my husband that I knew would take pride of place on his desk in work.


The Design Process

I was initially a little worried that it would take ages for me to design the products. As I am often short on time, I was concerned that I may be getting into a long drawn out process of selecting and uploading photographs one at a time and then having to rearrange them in a way that I wanted. However, I needn't have been worried as uploading the photographs was very quick and simple and I was able to select multiple photographs at a time to upload into my Father's Day Album. The majority of the photographs I used were original digital images, however some of the photos I wanted to use on my dad's mug were old photographs that I only had original prints of. As I don't have a working scanner at present, I just took photos of them using my camera phone in order to convert them into a digital image. I was unsure how good the quality would be, but they turned out absolutely fine and I had no issues in applying them to my design.

When I selected the mug option, I was then presented with a layout template, which also had a variety of other options displayed along the left hand side of the page. This included a layouts option which allowed you to amend the formation, a designs option which gave you some pre-designed ideas, a backgrounds option which gave you numerous different patterns, textures and colours to choose from and an embellishments option where you could add text designs or images on top of your photographs. The possibilities seemed literally endless!

Once I had completed my first mug design, I moved on to the second one for my husband. The kids joined in with this as I wanted them to have input with it being a gift from them. They chose some of their favourite photographs and also added a couple of embellishments. My daughter Emma who is 10 took control of the design process and working together with her two brothers they completed the mug design in less than ten minutes. We also wanted to purchase something for my husband's desk in work and so the kids then also completed the Personalised Table Top Panel which they thought he would really like. I made sure I was on hand in case my daughter had any difficulties but the process was simple enough for her and so she simply shouted me over as soon as they were ready for us to complete our purchase.

Purchase & Delivery

I registered our account so that our photos would be stored for future use and so that we could also monitor the progress of our items. The total bill for 2 x mugs and 1 x table-top panel came to £25.97 excluding delivery which I feel is excellent value for personalised gifts.

I placed the order on Sunday 21st May and immediately received an order confirmation via email. Only three days later on the Wednesday 24th May, I received a further email confirming that the items had been dispatched. This was far quicker than I was expecting and the following day I received the first of my items. I had expected the products to all be delivered together, however they did all arrive separately.

The first to arrive was the Personalised Table-Top Panel which was quickly followed the next day by the delivery of both of my mugs. I was very pleased with the prompt delivery and everything arrived perfect and undamaged.

The Products

I was absolutely delighted with all the products we had ordered. I wasn't expecting the quality to be as great as it was, so this was a wonderful surprise. All the images were perfectly clear and not blurry at all.

For my dad's mug I had chosen some of his favourite photos from the past including his wedding day and I feel that the design I had created was just perfect. The mugs are 11oz and suitable for tea, coffee and other hot drinks. They are dishwasher and microwave safe, and Snapfish recommend using a mild detergent in order to keep the photographs bright.

This product can be found here: Personalised Father's Day Gifts - White Coffee Mug 11oz




My husband's mug featured a selection of my children's favourite images and again we were really impressed with the outcome. The mugs can be customised with photo's, embellishments and even text, so you can get really creative with your design. My kids really enjoyed being able to do this together and didn't have any problems at all. However I noticed that there was a large help section should we have ran into any difficulty.

This product can be found here: Personalised Father's Day Gifts - White Coffee Mug 11oz




The Table-Top Panel had a high gloss finish and also featured a UV-resistant, scratch free coating and measured 7 x 5 inches. I noticed it was also available in larger sizes should you require your gift to be larger. The photo's were printed directly onto the wood and it had a great easel back feature which means it is easy to display on a shelf, table-top or desk in either portrait or landscape.

This product can be found here: Personalised Father's Day Gifts - 7x5 Wooden Table-Top Panel





Overall

Overall we really enjoyed using the Snapfish website. The whole process from designing the item to actually receiving the products was really simple and it is definitely a service that we will continue to use going forwards.

There are so many possibilities with the products and it is also really fun being able to be involved with designing your own gift.

If you would like to view the full range of Father's Day Gift's, then these can be found here:

Personalised Father's Day Gifts

I will also update this blog post after Father's Day to let you know exactly what the gift recipients thought!

Disclaimer: We were provided with a voucher code of £25 credit for the purpose of reviewing the website and it's products and providing an honest review of the service. All opinions are my own unless otherwise stated.

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