If you are reading this, you are probably planning a service in the next week or two. We will keep it short and practical.
How many to order
Two different orders, and most families need both.
For attendees: one per person, handed out with the program. Count your expected attendance and add 20 percent — services almost always draw more people than the family expects, and running out is worse than having extras. A 40-person service means ordering 50. A church memorial usually means 100 or more.
For the family: a smaller set, sometimes the same photo repeated so each sibling and child has one, sometimes several photos across a whole life. Five or ten is typical. There is no wrong answer here.
Choosing the photo
The instinct is to pick the most formal portrait available. Resist it. The photos that people keep on their refrigerators for the next fifteen years are almost never the studio portrait — they are the one where the person is laughing, or holding a grandchild, or standing in their own kitchen.
At two inches square, faces need to fill the frame. A full-body shot from across a room will not read. Crop close, or tell us to.
Old photographs are fine
Send what you have. A phone photo of a print, taken flat in window light, works better than most people expect. So does a scan. Faded, yellowed, and lightly damaged prints usually come back looking better than the original, because color correction can recover a lot of what time took out.
If an image genuinely will not reproduce well, we say so before printing rather than after.
What goes on the magnet
Most families include the photo, the full name, and the birth and death years. Some add a short line — a scripture, a phrase the person said constantly, the name of the town they were from. Anything longer than about eight words will not be readable at this size.
Timing, honestly
Standard production on a 100-piece order is five to seven business days after proof approval. Services do not wait for that.
Rush production exists and we do not charge families a premium for it during a bereavement. Call us with your service date before you order and we will tell you plainly whether we can make it. We would rather turn down the order than take your money and miss the date.
If you are in the Houston area, we deliver directly to funeral homes and churches, which removes one errand from a week that has too many.
Why families choose magnets over prayer cards
Prayer cards go into wallets and stay there. Programs get folded into a drawer. Neither is wrong, but neither gets seen again.
A magnet ends up on a refrigerator door, which is the surface a family passes a dozen times a day. Several families have told us that seeing that face in the kitchen every morning was harder for the first month and better for every month after. That is worth knowing before you decide.
Browse memorial magnets → or call us if the timeline is tight.