How we make and ship a print.

Hahnemühle German Etching, FSC-certified

Hahnemühle is a German paper mill founded in 1584 — one of the oldest still in operation. Their fine-art papers are FSC-certified, made from α-cellulose from sustainably-managed forests, and produced in a mill that uses spring-fed water with closed-loop recycling. German Etching 310gsm is acid-free, lignin-free, and certified by Wilhelm Imaging Research for archival performance — at least 100 years under glass without meaningful fade.

Acid-free is the part most people don’t think about but matters most. The brown spotting that ruins old prints (foxing) is a function of paper chemistry over time. Acidic wood-pulp papers degrade themselves; cotton-rag and α-cellulose papers don’t. The print you buy today will outlive most of the room it hangs in.

Pigment, not dye

Every print goes down with archival pigment inks rather than dye-based ones. Pigment inks bond the colourant to paper as a physical particle; dye inks dissolve the colourant chemically. Pigment lasts; dye fades under ultraviolet light within years. The 100-year rating on the print depends on the ink as much as the paper.

The trade-off: pigment inks are more expensive to make and slower to dry. We accept both because the print is the long object — the dispatch slip is the short one.

Print on demand — nothing made until ordered

We don’t hold stock. Every print is made to order after a customer commits, then framed, then dispatched. The model is operated by our production partner Prodigi from regional hubs in the UK, EU, US, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere — so an order from New York prints in New York, not London. Reduces transit distance, reduces air-freight, and means we never destroy unsold inventory (because there isn’t any). The cost on our side is slightly longer lead times — every order takes 5–7 working days before it ships rather than coming off a shelf.

This is the single biggest environmental decision we make. Most art-print sellers fund cheap unit pricing with bulk print runs and end-of-season discounting; the prints that don’t sell get pulped. We’d rather take the longer lead time and not produce a print until we’ve already sold it.

UK supply chain, made by hand

Frames are hand-assembled in our Surrey workshop. The mouldings are solid wood from UK and European suppliers, cut, joined, and finished on site. Mounts are conservation- grade acid-free board. Glazing is UV-filtering acrylic by default — safer than glass in occupied rooms, lighter to ship, and indistinguishable optically on modern museum-grade acrylic.

Solid wood holds up to decades of reframing — we’d rather sell a frame once and re-cut the mount in twenty years than ship a particle-board piece that fatigues in five.

What goes in the box, and how it gets there

Unframed prints ship in rigid recycled-board tubes with acid-free tissue between the print and the inner wall. Framed prints go in double-walled cardboard cartons with corrugated corner blocks, acid-free tissue across the face, and minimal plastic — only what’s needed to keep moisture off the glazing in transit. UK orders move by Royal Mail or DPD depending on size; international orders by the appropriate carrier from the nearest regional Prodigi hub.

The packaging isn’t plastic-free yet. There’s a small amount of tape and corner foam on framed shipments that we haven’t found a satisfactory substitute for without raising the breakage rate. Working on it.

A small team, a small building

We’re a small operation. One Surrey workshop, a handful of people, no warehouse beyond what fits a couple of weeks of in-flight work. The gallery’s footprint in absolute terms is small enough that the production + shipping side is where every meaningful sustainability decision sits — which is why the notes above are about paper, ink, and freight rather than office solar panels.