Cornwall-made anniversary gifts, since 2008
In 2008, our small workshop in Cornwall began casting jewellery from locally-sourced tin. Tin is the traditional gift for the 10th wedding anniversary, and at the time it was almost impossible to find a real tin gift made in the UK. Word travelled. Within a couple of years we'd opened offices in the United States and Australia just to keep up with international demand for traditional tin anniversary jewellery.
In mid-2013 we launched anniversarygifts.co.uk to bring the same craft to every other wedding anniversary year — paper for the 1st, leather for the 3rd, wood for the 5th, copper for the 7th, bronze for the 8th, all the way through to silver at the 25th and our extensive 26+ range beyond.
Today, more than 90% of what we sell is still made by our own team in Cornwall. We have a metal-casting department that creates our jewellery and crafted gifts from raw metal stock, and our own laser-engraving department for personalisation. Every product is finished by hand. Our range changes constantly because each year of a marriage is its own moment, and the gift should match.
The tradition behind anniversary gifts
The custom of giving a particular gift for each wedding anniversary goes back centuries. The word "anniversary" itself comes from the Medieval Latin anniversārius, a combination of annus (year) and vertere (to turn) — meaning "returning yearly." The practice of giving year-specific gifts originated in Central Europe; among medieval Germans it was customary for friends to present a wife with a wreath of silver after twenty-five years of marriage, and a wreath of gold after fifty. The silver and gold weddings come from there.
The full materials list — paper for the 1st through diamond for the 60th — was elaborated and standardised in the 20th century. Before the 1930s only the milestone years (1st, 5th, 10th, 20th, 25th, 50th, 75th) had assigned materials. The full year-by-year list is now widely accepted in the UK, and you can read it in detail in our Wedding Anniversary Gift List article.
What "made in Cornwall" actually means here
Cornwall has a longer history with tin than almost anywhere on earth. The mines of Carlyon, Redruth and Geevor were among the most important tin sources in the world from the Bronze Age right up until the 20th century. When we started, we were a small workshop in a region with thousands of years of metalwork heritage — and that's still our home today.
The tin we use is real tin. The bronze we cast is real bronze. The personalisation is done by people who work down the corridor from where the gift was cast. We don't import finished gifts and rebrand them.
Why couples come back
Each anniversary year has its own meaning, and our range is built to honour that. As your marriage grows and gets stronger, so does the material — paper at year one, tin at ten, silver at twenty-five, gold at fifty. Couples return to us year after year because we have the gift for the year you're celebrating, made by the same team, with the same care.