For your mom

Moms are hard to shop for, for one simple reason: they already have everything except the one thing nobody has ever given back to them. Their story. A personalized gift for your mom turns what only your family knows into an illustrated book, with her as the protagonist and her real face on every page.

The moments only your family knows

It is not a bought gift, it is a told one. For example:

• The saying she repeats, the one everyone can finish for her
• The recipe nobody can match even when they follow the same steps
• Sunday breakfasts, homework afternoons, the long drives
• The hands that fixed everything whenever something broke

You write the moments the way you would tell them to a friend; the story is written and illustrated from a photo of her (and of the rest of you, if more of the family appears), and you approve every page before anything is printed. The dedication on the first page is yours, and it is usually the page that makes her cry.

For milestone birthdays and for random Tuesdays

It is the natural gift for a round birthday, for Mother's Day or for a retirement, but the ones that get remembered most are the ones that arrive without a date: a book of her story on an ordinary Tuesday says more than any bouquet. In hardback it becomes a real book, the kind that gets shown to visitors; the narrated audiobook adds a voice to it, and the digital edition arrives in minutes if the occasion is tomorrow.

Below you can read a real story created around a mom: The Road Inside the Shoebox, where a daughter reconstructs who her mother was before her, clue by clue. There are more in Mother's Day stories, and if the gift is for someone else in the family, here are all the occasions to give a story.