Story Behind Pages Gift Books
These unashamedly sentimental handmade gifts bearing their over the top expression of romance and love , that deliberately attempt to bring tears to your eyes in their overt displays of love and affection and sentiment.
Found their inspiration not as one would perhaps expect ,from some wonderfully loving or romantic gesture.
They found their start in life ,from all things ,nothing other than a giant row ,between my husband and myself one birthday.
My husband who could not for the life of him understand why I was not overly appreciative of the “pool cue” he had just given me as a birthday present.
After years of (from my point of view ) horrible insensitive gifts ,I craved something that had some personal tender feelings behind it. That unashamedly proclaimed in a loud proud voice, a little romance and love , affection ,and appreciation , for once in an over the top no holds barred kind of way. Something that appealed largely to the feminine side ,and after 26 years of being married to the most romantically challenged man in the whole world, I felt I was long over due .
I got upset about the pool cue and yelled at him
“I want something that makes me feel you’ve thought about me!, That I’m special to you!, that you love me?, something a little romantic. A pool cue doesn’t say that!” I screamed”
“There’s no gift anywhere in the entire universe that says all that.
Why are women so difficult to buy for? I’m not the only guy that thinks that you know?” he yelled back petulantly
As mad and disappointed as I was (the calmer ,cooler less angry part of me knew that perhaps he had a point ) and so the idea for Pages heartfelt sentimental , handmade gifts was born.
I decided I would make the perfect gift that I had longed to get ,a gift for women of any age, but especially for those women who have been married for a few years and are beginning to feel like me ,a little romantically neglected ,would die to receive from their husbands. ….a little romance and sentiment, at last if you please.
I began to exhibit my Pages from The Heart gift books (as that is what I had decided to name my handmade gifts ) at local craft shows and community festival events. I will not lie to you, they did not sell as I wanted them to.
My handmade gifts always sell better to females than males. I believe this to be because on the whole women to a greater or lesser extent are naturally more romantically inclined , demonstratively affectionate and sentimental by nature ,while guys on the other hand by and large are not, or they hide it very well. Consequently men don’t realize or forget, that their ladies view life from a different perspective and value other things than they . Because men do not value romance and tend lets be very honest now, tend to confuse sex with romance ,which if you bothered to ask almost any female on the planet ,gentlemen, you would be told at once,that they are only remotely related , only second cousins at best.
Men do not require (if my husband is to be believed ) little signs of affection and devotion in the same way that we ladies do, so consequently they fail to appreciate how meaningful to their ladies, the small gestures of love and appreciation and gifts displaying a loving sentiment would truly be .
To my shock and horror I discovered most guys are embarrassed by feelings of emotion (it wasn’t just my husband after all ), and try to avoid displaying them themselves at all costs, they neglect the need for proof of life of these softer feelings, that their ladies crave. Very often at craft fairs at which I exhibited my range of explicitly sentimental handmade gifts , often a couple would stop by my booth ,the woman would ooh and awe at one or other of pages handmade gifts books , and try to draw her husbands attention to it ,more often than not the guy would stand there with averted eyes trying to look anywhere than at what he saw as the over the top embarrassing chocolate box sentiments brazenly displayed before him. Often rushing her away to the muscle cars or what ever happened to be the most masculine event at that particular fair, wanting to replenish his manliness, just in case any wishy washy sentiment from my handmade gifts might of inadvertently contaminated his male essence.
My loving handmade gifts only sold so so at craft shows as my target market men don’t attend craft fairs as a general rule (or at least not many willingly), the ladies of course were all very attracted by my range of highly sentimental gifts , many even purchased gift books for male relatives to give to their wives, as they realized what a treasured and cherished keepsake it would become.
So in the absence of many craft show attending guys ,I decided to broaden my range of handmade gifts books to include designs women could more readily buy for themselves as ornamental items and to give to each other as gifts for special life occasions, and I did much better as far as sales figures went at the craft shows I attended.
But to some degree I always felt I had failed , that I had not achieved my purpose as my Pages from the Heart were created to fill a particular void . My husband has always complained at birthdays and Christmas or any other gift giving occasion, that he could never find anything with ease ,that he felt confident would please me, he knew many guys who claimed to feel equally overwhelmed ,I had created this line of gifts to particularly fill that void ,to be a cast in stone, iron clad , guaranteed to please gift, that a guy could give to his significant other with every confidence in the world that it would be well received and cherished indefinitely as a constant reminder of the gentleman’s seldom spoken feelings.
So when our long standing business was forced to close ,rather than find a job on some cash register somewhere I decided to take my range of sentimental gifts on to the internet in the hope of broadening my customer base and hopefully tapping into via the internet that all elusive male gift buying market, and so we meet.
