Started with one set, painted badly

The first set was for a friend's birthday and it was not good. The lines wobbled, the top coat went cloudy, and two of the nails did not fit. She wore them anyway, which is how most of these things start.

What changed was the pet portraits. Someone asked whether we could paint their cat, then their dog who had just died, and suddenly the work stopped being about nail art and started being about keeping something close.

We still paint everything by hand, one set at a time. No printers, no decals, no batch of five hundred sitting in a warehouse waiting to be sold. If you order, we paint it after — which is why it takes a week or two, and why nobody else has one exactly like it.

We are a small operation. The person who answers your email is the person who paints your set. That is deliberate, and it is also why we ask for a photo and a proof approval before we start: it is easier to get it right than to explain why it is wrong.