When Someone Else Takes the Order: Handing Off the Keepsake Process

The first keepsake order your shop takes without you will be taken by whoever was standing nearest the register. It will be a Saturday. It will be the groomer, or the part-timer on the front desk, and they will get asked the two questions nobody briefed them on: how much, and how soon.

Fixing that does not take a manual. It takes one sheet of paper and twenty minutes.

The sheet in the drawer

One page. Printed. In a plastic sleeve, taped inside the drawer under the counter. Not a folder on the shop laptop that nobody opens while a family is standing there holding a photograph.

What goes on it:

Price: $329, or $249 at the Launch Price. Size: 7.9″ / 200 mm across, 20 mm thick, 1.8 kg (nearly 4 lb) with its base. Turnaround: fifteen to eighteen days from the approved preview — counted from the preview, not from the day the order is written down. Ships worldwide, free in the US. One size only, no second tier, no household rate.

Then the part the counter uses most. It is two layers of high-clarity glass with the photograph sealed between them — not natural quartz crystal — on a wood base. Nothing goes inside. No collar, no tag, no fur, no ashes. Every staff member gives the same answer to that question, and it is not an apology.

Two last lines. Photos are filed in the shared folder the same day they arrive, named and dated. And anything not on the sheet: take the client's number and text the owner, and the client gets a call back within the hour.

That last line is the one that keeps a program out of trouble. It gives a nineteen-year-old permission to say "let me get you a real answer" instead of inventing one.

What anyone can say, and what only you say

Anyone at the desk can give the price, the size and the turnaround. Those never change, and there is no version of them that quietly goes out of date.

Only you give a specific arrival date. Only you talk about a price somebody is trying to negotiate, and only you handle a piece that came out wrong.

The line is drawn there on purpose. A staff member repeating "$329" is passing along information. A staff member promising "it'll be there by the fourteenth" is making a promise that a production calendar has to keep, on a job that does not start moving until a family approves a preview. Different kinds of sentences.

The twenty-minute handover

Sit at the counter, not in the office. The counter is where the questions get asked, and the room matters when you are teaching somebody what to say in it.

Hand over the sheet and read it out loud once, including the last two lines.

Then have them take one order end to end using a photo you already have — something off your own phone, a piece from your shelf. They write the client name, the pet name, the ship-to, the date the photo came in. They say the price out loud. They say the size out loud too, because "seven point nine inches across" is a sentence most people fumble the first time.

Finish with the questions they will actually get, in the order they usually arrive. What if the client asks for a smaller one. What if the only photo is on a phone with a cracked screen. What if the family wants it before a birthday next week. If they can answer those without reaching for you, they can cover a Saturday.

The order book

One column per order, on paper or in a shared note — whichever one actually gets used. Six fields: date the photo arrived, who took the order, client phone, pet name, whether this ships to you or straight to the family, and whether the preview has been approved.

That last field is the one people skip and then need. When a client calls three weeks later and the piece is sitting still, you want to see at a glance that the order is paused on a preview nobody has approved, and who is holding it up.

Log the day the photo arrives rather than the day the client said yes. Files sit in inboxes for a week before anybody looks at them, and the fifteen-to-eighteen-day clock does not start until a preview is approved anyway. A client who was told the real timeline is never surprised by it.

When somebody quotes the wrong number

Somebody will. Usually on the first busy Saturday, usually low, usually because they half-remembered the price list on the wall from last year.

Fix it the same day, in one message, before the client repeats it to a friend.

Hi Dana — one correction before this goes any further. The piece is $329, with a launch price of $249, one size, made from your photo. Sorry for the mix-up on Saturday. Nothing about your order changes and I'll take this one myself.

Then take it yourself. A corrected number with a familiar name attached is a small thing. The same corrected number, from a stranger, two weeks later, turns into a client wondering what else the shop gets wrong.

Damage, and the sentence that ends it

Occasionally a piece arrives with a chip on an edge, or a photo that reads differently from the preview. The desk does not have to negotiate when that happens. The line is fixed, and it is written on the sheet:

“Arrives damaged or doesn’t match your approved preview? We’ll remake it free.”

Say it, photograph the box before anything is unpacked further, and send it on. A staff member who has the sentence does not have to decide anything, and a client who hears it once stops worrying about the shipping.

The second order is where it shows

Most of the value in this program comes from the same client coming back — the second dog, a sibling's cat, a piece for a parent. And the second order almost never goes to the same person as the first.

Which is why the sheet is worth more than the training. A staff member who has never met the client can open the drawer, read six lines, and give the same answers the client got last year. Same price, same size, same timeline, same "nothing goes inside." Consistency is the whole promise at this price, and consistency is cheap: one page, one drawer, twenty minutes with each new hire.

Two of the questions that get handed back to you most often are covered elsewhere. The collar and the "can it be smaller" requests are in the requests you have to turn down, and the point where money should actually change hands is in deposits and when to charge.

If you want the partner sheet — specs, the preview process, the price you resell at, plus the desk page you can print and copy straight across — ask for it here. MOQ is one.