A small studio for the slow-water life.
Narrowboat Gifts is a one-product studio in the UK making personalised editorial prints for narrowboat owners, canal cruisers and the people who love them. Every print is made to order with the boat name, the canal you cruise, and a date that mattered. We ship from the UK in five working days.
Why we made this
Most "narrowboat gifts" are tat — a kettle with a cartoon barge on it, a fridge magnet shaped like a lock. The actual culture of canals is older and quieter than that, closer to traditional signwriting than gift-shop kitsch.
We wanted a piece of paper that looked the way the slow-water life feels. So we made one. Set the boat name in editorial serif. Set the canal in small caps. Put the day that mattered in italic. Print it on the kind of paper that frames well. Send it in a tube.
That's the whole product. We'll add others over time — mugs that aren't horrible, milestone cards for moving aboard, cards for first cruises, vector route prints when we get the cartography right — but we'd rather make a small number of things properly than a catalogue of things badly.
How we make it
You type the boat name, canal route and date into the customiser. What you see on screen is what we print — same SVG template, same typography, same palette. Sat on a 200gsm semi-glossy paper that frames cleanly and ships flat in a kraft tube.
Production is handled by Gelato in their UK facility — we don't warehouse anything, so nothing sits at expiry. Your print starts life the working day after you order it and reaches you in five to nine working days, tracked.
Returns: because every print is made-to-order with the details you supply, the right to cancel under regulation 28 of the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 doesn't apply. If something arrives damaged or wrong from what you ordered, we reprint and reship at our cost. Full detail on /returns/.
The boring but important bit.
- Trading entity
- Narrowboat Gifts — UK trading name. Registered details to be published once the limited-company registration completes.
- Production partner
- Gelato (Gelato Group AS, Norway), printing in their UK facility for UK customers. ISO 9001 + 14001 certified.
- Payments
- Card payments processed by Stripe Payments UK Ltd. We never see or store your card number. PCI DSS Level 1.
- Data & privacy
- UK GDPR controller. ICO registration in progress (number published once issued). See /privacy/ for the full breakdown.
- Email & support
- [email protected] — read by humans, replied to within one working day.
- Sustainability
- Made-to-order means no warehouse waste. Packaging is FSC kraft tubes and recycled paper — no plastics, no fillers.
Ready to make one?
Type your boat name, canal and date — see it set in editorial serif as you go. £19 to £32, posted in five working days.
Personalise a print