When we say it, the first reaction is usually disbelief: a lifetime warranty on a business card? Yes. No expiry and no receipt to keep, with the rules written out in full in the Terms and Conditions: the warranty covers manufacturing defects.
What it covers, exactly
Three things, and they are the three that can genuinely happen to an object that spends years in a pocket or a bag: the wood breaking, the chip going silent, the engraving wearing away through a manufacturing defect. In each of those cases we make you a new one. There is no form to fill in and no deadline to meet: you write to us with a photo, we look at the case and, if it falls under the warranty, we sort it out.
Left out are damage from misuse (hard knocks, water, excessive heat), surface scratches, the normal ageing of the wood, and repairs attempted by others. The full list is in the Terms.
There is no expiry either. "Lifetime" is not marketing shorthand for two years: it still holds ten years from now, on a card bought today.
Why we can afford it
The reason is simple: we are so confident in the construction that the warranty costs us nothing. In three layers of wood cold-pressed together with the grain crossing at 90° there is almost nothing that can break with everyday use. The crossed grain spreads stress in every direction — the same idea as plywood — and it is why the card does not warp or swell with humidity, which is how thin wood normally fails.
Total thickness is around 2 mm, in the standard 85 × 54 mm format: it fits any cardholder, and it is not so thin that it flexes when you sit on it. The finish is linseed oil and beeswax, not a plastic varnish: it cannot chip or peel, and if the wood ever dulls, a pass of wax brings it back.
The chip is the part people worry about. It is also the toughest.
The question we get most is not about the wood but the electronics: what if the chip stops working? Inside there is an NTAG216, 888 rewritable bytes, certified for over 100,000 write cycles — comfortably more than you will use in an entire career. It has no battery: it draws power from the phone's magnetic field in the instant you tap, and between taps it is an inert piece of copper. There is nothing that can run flat.
It is also shielded against interference, so it works resting on a metal surface — the situation where cheap NFC tags simply fail to answer.
And there is one more reason the chip never wears out: when your number, site or role changes you do not rewrite it. The chip always holds the same address; what changes is what that address shows, and you update it from the dashboard, free, forever. The chip is written once, by us, before it ships.
The engraving is not print
The third case the warranty covers is the one that always happens to printed cards: the text fading. Here it cannot, because there is no ink. The engraving is cut by laser to a tenth of a millimetre and burns the surface layer of the wood: the mark is the wood itself, not something laid on top of it. It cannot lift, scratch off, or lose colour in the sun.
The check that makes the warranty almost theoretical
Every card goes through six operations done by hand — selecting the timber, cutting and gluing, pressing, engraving, configuring the chip, final inspection — and the last one is a real test: the engraving is checked, the chip is read with a phone, the geometry is squared. What leaves the workshop has already been tried.
That is why the only case in which the warranty genuinely applies is a manufacturing defect we failed to catch before delivery. And in that case, replacing the card is simply the right thing to do.
A promise that binds us first
Offering a lifetime warranty is also a commitment to ourselves: it forces us not to cut corners on wood selection, bonding, or engraving. Every card that leaves the workshop carries our name — literally, in the engraving — and we cannot afford to do it badly. It is an easy promise to keep only as long as the work behind it stays a carpenter's, not a production line's.