Many people ask us to write a name on the back of our pre-made $9.95 ornaments and not charge them extra. In fact, quite few order our regular $9.95 cats and the send us an e-mail afterwards telling us all the customizations they would like done. They are often upset with us when we decline to do so. This simply is not an option for the following reasons.

We always have to start with a new ornament for custom orders. All the $9.95 ornaments you see online are already waxed, sorted and ready to go. We do them in large batches to keep the cost down. It is simply not as easy as writing a name or date on the back of a pre-made ornament. We would have to remove the hard wax finish from the pre-mades just for starters. This means that it would be far more work and time for us to use an already finished ornament than it would be to start a new custom cat.

Painting customized cat ornaments takes much more time and effort than producing standardized cat patterns. There is also much more attention to detail put into the painting of custom cats. Eye shape is often changed from the original pattern to match the subject more closely. The ears are also often enlarged a bit if necessary.

Most custom cat orders require a lot of customer contact which takes up a quite a bit of time as well. We certainly enjoy this, but with the amount of custom orders that come in we have to make sure that it is worth our time. Once the custom cat blank is made (a time consuming process in itself), the painting of it often takes well over an hour. This doesn't even factor in handling, shipping and paperwork.

Therefore we simply could not do custom cats for $9.95. We would put ourselves out of business if we tried!

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