Personalised

Most of what sits here is engraving on something your dog or cat already needs — a collar with a name and contact number lasered straight into the webbing or the buckle, or a stainless steel ID tag stamped with the same details. Both save you buying a separate dangling tag that can catch on things or fall off.

The rest is keepsakes rather than everyday kit: memorial urns, photo frames and night lights made to hold a picture of a pet who has died. These aren't impulse buys, and most people ordering one already know exactly what they want on it.

Whatever you're having personalised, check the proof carefully before you confirm it — engraving is done to the spelling and the phone number you type in, not what you meant to type, and a mistake on an engraved plate can't be edited afterwards the way a printed label can.

Keep the wording short. A collar plate or an LED collar's engraving area is small, so a name and one phone number is usually all that fits cleanly; anything longer starts getting squeezed and harder to read at a glance, which defeats the point if your dog ever goes missing.

A personalised collar with the details built into the material tends to survive better day to day than a dangling tag, because there's nothing hanging off a D-ring to catch on a fence or a car door and pull loose. It's the better choice for a dog who is out and about a lot.

A stainless steel tag is still worth having as a backup, or for a cat who wears a quick-release collar that a tag can be swapped onto easily. It's also the cheaper way to update a phone number without replacing the whole collar.