Our Case for Handwritten Notes, less the nostalgia

Every few years somebody writes the article: letter-writing is dead, nobody puts pen to paper anymore, whatever happened to the art of correspondence. This is not that piece. Our case for the handwritten note is simpler: a text is a message, but a note, on the other hand, is an object.

Objects behave differently to messages. A card or note gets propped on a shelf for a fortnight. It gets tucked into the frame of a mirror, kept in a biscuit tin, found in a drawer eleven years later in handwriting you'd know anywhere, and the finding of it is a small event. Messages scroll away; nobody in the history of the world has kept a WhatsApp in a shoebox. When you write by hand you are not just saying something, you are giving something and the recipient knows the difference without being told.

The occasions are more numerous than people think. The thank-you after dinner, which is the true closing move of hosting, sent within the week while the evening is still warm. The congratulations that would feel thin as a message but lands properly in a card. And my absolute favourite, the no-reason note, three sentences to say you were thought of on an ordinary Tuesday. That's the other liberating truth: three sentences is plenty. A note is not an essay, it's a gesture and it takes all of ten minutes to write.

If the note is an object, the card it's written on is half the gift. I've always had a soft spot for beautiful stationery, so when I came across Kate Cronk's hand-drawn cards on one of my trips to London, I knew I wanted to stock her in the shop. She works from a studio in Kent under her Peggy & Kate label — gardens, dogs and English domestic charm, cards good enough that recipients have been known to frame them. Every one is blank inside, which is the correct way: no printed sentiment to talk over yours, and nothing to stop the same card serving a birthday, a thank-you or a Tuesday. Browse our card collection and buy more than you need, because the real barrier to writing is never the writing. It's having nothing decent in the house to write on.

So keep a drawer stocked: cards for no occasion, a pen you enjoy, then the ten minutes is all it takes and what you send will outlive the occasion it marks. Every order that leaves our studio carries a note — small, handwritten, no reason needed beyond the fact that you're about to open a box. Almost nothing else you write today can have that impact.