Never just A jar

You are probably reading this because you have bought or been given one of our jars. You may not have quite thought through the full ramifications of that yet. Most likely you have never thought about how significant a humble jar can be.

We have had plenty of time to do so.

When I was little, my great grandmother's pride and joy in the kitchen was a row of ceramic jars. They were from a time when ingredients were precious and people knew how to take care of things. It took me a good few years to find the right type of glass for our version of those, but when we did, we have not looked back.

Many of you will have started your journey with our jars with our TEA, COFFEE and SUGAR trio, or with DAD'S NUTS. Few end it there.

Whether you are buying for yourself or as a present for somebody else, it is very rare that somebody only buys one jar.

You will probably already have noticed all the amazing uses. Our jars are most at home in the kitchen, and we will come back to a particular kitchen later, but people use them in almost every room of the house.

The laundry room needs jars for the Vanish powder, the laundry tablets, the spare batteries, the spools of ribbon, and the general bits and bobs. The boot room can take DOG TREATS, POO BAGS and BIRD SEEDS to mention a few. The bathroom needs one for bath salts, another for cotton buds, and maybe even one for the shells and treasures you have collected from far away places. The office or study wants a little jar of nuts, or whatever else fuels you while you are working. And don't forget the handy place to store all your RECEIPTS!

The list is long.

We have a number of customers who are true collectors of our jars. They tend to start with one and end up, two years later, with twenty. One of the biggest collectors of all lives not too far from us, and the other day we paid her a visit. Her name is Valeri, in Whitstable.

She has set the standard very high for kitchen goals. Look at Val's cupboards.

Val even had her kitchen company make the shelves to the perfect dimensions for our jars. And she still keeps ordering more.

The thing is, very often the jars start their life in a home as a thoughtful gift.

Holly Tucker at Holly & Co gifted one to each member of her team, every one filled with the thing she knows fuels them. This is almost always the start of something. The person who receives a jar tends to come back for a second within a few months, this time for somebody else they have noticed. Then a third for the kitchen shelf at home. We have customers four years in who have lost count of how many they own.

It is when you give a jar to somebody else that it becomes most effective.

Some of our most-ordered engravings are not really about what's inside the jar. They are about telling somebody you understand them.

BIKE NUTS for the cyclist whose Saturday morning is a 60-mile ride you would never go on. RUN FUEL for the friend training for her first marathon. GOLF NUTS for the husband whose handicap you do not entirely understand. STUDIO SNACKS for the painter. KNIT NIGHT for the friend who hosts the Wednesday circle. HALF-TIME SNACKS for the rugby coach.

The trick of these jars is that you do not have to know what cyclists actually want. You do not need to choose between a chain whip and a cassette and a pair of bib shorts in the right size. A jar that says BIKE NUTS says, I see this thing you love.

We hear from customers all the time that the BIKE NUTS jar was the bit of the present the husband picked up first, and the cycling jacket got opened second. The little jar, full of his favourite cashews, with a single carved word on the lid, is the gift that landed.

That is the trick of the engraving in two words: I noticed.

There is a particular kind of person who defeats every gift list. The teacher who has had a mug for every Christmas since she started. The tweenie or teenager who wants either one very specific pair of trainers or absolutely nothing. The brother-in-law who is deep into 'that thing' you know almost nothing about. And Grandpa, who hasn't received a gift he genuinely wanted since 1953.

A jar quietly solves all of them.

For the teacher, a STAFFROOM SNACKS or THANK YOU MISS jar, filled with the good chocolate. For the teenager, FUEL or PROTEIN, sitting on the desk where their friends will see it. For the brother-in-law, you do not need to know the difference between a fly reel and a spinning reel. You just need a jar engraved FISHING SNACKS with a packet of Percy Pigs inside, and you have landed it.

And for Grandpa, a small jar that lives by his favourite chair, refilled forever with Werther's Originals or liquorice allsorts. He will reach for it every evening without quite knowing why it makes him so happy. You will know.

When you gift a jar, the engraving is an opportunity to say a bit more than the words actually spell out.

Say you want a treat for a friend. Instead of engraving it BATH SALT, you engrave it RELAX, and you have elevated it into something genuinely thoughtful. Instead of ENERGY BARS, we often engrave FOR THE LONG RUN. Our sourdough starter jars often simply say FEED ME...

Our website is full of brilliant examples where the humble jar is doing some very heavy lifting.

All of which is in addition, of course, to the jars doing what jars do best. They keep the ingredients, the supplements, the snacks and the small daily things stored neatly and to hand, looking pretty while they do it.

They become 'the place you keep...'. The place where the children will find a treat. The place you reach into and notice that it is nearly empty, so you add it to the list.

They become part of every day.

A few weeks ago, my mother passed me a small parcel. Inside were my great grandmother's ceramic jars. The same ones I had stood next to as a small child while she measured out flour and sugar and oats with quiet ceremony.

They are 100 years old now.

I think this might be where the story has been heading the whole time. Not the kitchen tour, not even Val's larder, but the long quiet line that connects one row of jars on a great grandmother's shelf to a row on yours. Each one chosen for what it would hold, kept carefully because it mattered.

That is our hope for ours, too. That somewhere a hundred years from now, somebody is passed a small parcel by their grandmother, and inside is a jar that has been on a kitchen shelf since the day before she was born, with a carved word on the lid that meant something quiet and particular to the woman who gave it.

It really has never been just a jar.

The full jar collection lives here [Shop all jars -->]

Every jar can be engraved with pretty much anything you like. Logo's and crests work well too. You just have to email those to us separately.

If you have been gifting our jars to other people for a while, your Acorns have been quietly building too.

They can come off up to half the price of your next order. Including, in good time, a jar of your own.

For more of the same kind of this is never just a thing thinking, our journal piece It's never just a chopping board is the sister read.

And if you ever fill your shelves the way Val has, please send us a photograph.

Should you change your mind and want to keep something different in your jar you can buy a 'LID ONLY' or if somebody breaks a jar you can buy a 'JAR ONLY', because all our designs are made for life...