Dog Name Tags Hand Made in St Albans

What’s all this about St Albans and Dog Name Tags? Explain yourself

We just wanted you to know we live and work right here in St Albans, which is in Hertfordshire, which is in England. Our official business address is somewhere in London. We’re definitely in St Albans though. Not too far from The Wick. If you’re a local, you’ll know where that is. Here’s a handy map to The Wick Local Nature Reserve Location just in case. The Ten Year Tags official Head of Security, Dweezil, is very much a Wick dog. 

Why should I care you’re in St Albans?

Fair question. Why should you care? I thought you might like to know where your dog’s name tag is coming from, for delivery time reasons if nothing else.

BY THE WAY, you may now comment on this page, see down below. Go on, you know you want to…

One or two of our competitors aren’t totally clear about where your tag ships from and have long, LONG shipping times and potential extra customs charges as a result. Not Ten Year Tags. We’re just about in earshot of Clarence Park, and, when there’s a match on, can usually hear the vast crowds cheering on St Albans City Football Club as it battles its way to the top of the National League, which I am distressed to learn is known as The Vanarama League at the moment, ‘for sponsorship reasons’.

Additionally if you ARE in St Albans yourself as well, we might just be able to deliver your dog’s ID tag by hand, which means your dog gets tagged a tiny bit quicker.

Just to be clear: ‘by hand’ is meaning through your letterbox.

I didn’t mean we’d be lurking about outside Budgens at The Quadrant, waiting for you to stroll past, spotting a copy of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, poking out of my jacket’s top book pocket, marking time until you give the agreed signal. What would a good signal be? Probably you making a seabird-like squawking noise. Discreetly. 

At that point I could either hand you the package or drop it for you to pick up quizzically, as I move shiftily away. This would have the added advantage of making the exchange look as much like espionage as possible. It could work you know, I mean we have to make our own entertainment these days don’t we?

Three Men in The Boot

Seriously, if you’re in St Albans we’d be delighted to pop your tag through your door on the way to or from the Brick Knoll Park sorting office, we keep a look-out for any local addresses of course. Anything St Albans, Harpenden, Hatfield, or Radlett, stands out naturally and will probably be delivered by hand because it’s EXCITING for us.

The nearest order we’ve had was from pretty much across the road. That house there, I can see it from here. I’ve dropped a few tags off as far away as Harpenden in the past, yes really. Harpenden. Can you imagine? Of course you can. 

What’s this got to do with The Boot? Well, it’s a favourite pub of ours for a start. We’ve had many Ten Year Tags official team meetings / corporate team building exercises / crafty pints when we should have been doing something else there over the years. So much so, it’s referred to as ‘Meeting Room 12’ here at Tagmaster Towers. It’s also where I was when I got a call for what turned out to be our biggest ever order for – wait for it – 1,000 tags.

This large quantity dog tag order became a hand-delivered one too, despite being a few train journeys away, down in Surrey. It had to be delivered by hand largely because it was so heavy, but mostly because it took so much hard work to complete. I really wanted to be sure it got there safely. 

Coincidentally the call came from where I moved to St Albans from almost 6 years ago, in 2003. Yes yes, I know that was 20 years ago now, I just don’t want to admit it. Anyway, we’re talking about Kingston upon Thames, the somewhat oversubscribed Surrey town that’s also the setting for a favourite Jerome K. Jerome book of mine, the name of which momentarily escapes me. 

The Brothers Trust

The call came from the family of a famous actor, who we hadn’t heard of.

The plan was to have rather marvellous collars for dogs hand-made by Masai ladies in Nairobi. Our job here, live in St Albans, was providing a thousand 22mm x 2mm Solid Brass Tags with The Brothers trust logo deeply engraved on them. 

These were then to be sold via the magic of The Brothers Trust Online Shop We managed to work out a deal where we could just about cover our costs to produce the tags and get them to Kingston-upon-Thames, making sure the most money possible went to the charity concerned. The first batch of 250 sold out in about six minutes.

Anyway, in the intervening time we’d managed to educate ourselves re: who Tom Holland was and were pleased to note he appears to be both super-skilled as well as quite literally one of the loveliest people in the world.

We were consequently proud to have helped this outstanding cause a wee bit. All proceeds of the collar sales go to the Nairobi charity. Just ONE collar generates enough revenue to provide fifty children with a square meal. It made a few weeks of extremely late nights* worth it.

*We only had one machine that could do these then and had to run it out of hours to engrave and then cut The Brothers Trust dog tags out. The renovated, vintage engraving machine in question certainly can’t be left unsupervised. It’s surprising how little sleep we can manage with if we have no choice!

A Local, St Albans, Page 

This is turning out to look like a local page, for local people. I’ll append it with anything else I can think of that might be useful to locals. Can you think of anything? I mean anything St Albans-specific, along the lines of: 

St Albans Dog Walks 

St Albans Dog Walkers

St Albans Pet Shops (Quadrant Pet Supplies St Albans is our favourite) 

St Albans Vets (we are super-fond of Village Vet / Caytons – it saved the life of Dweezil, aforementioned Head of Security when he was a lot younger and it was there for us IMMEDIATELY in the early hours when our previous New Zealand Huntaway, Lulu – the dog who gave us the idea for Ten Year Tags – left us in her fourteenth year). 

There you go, thank you and thank you Lulu. Let me know if you have any ideas via the magic of the Ten Year Tags Contact Page. Ah go on now…

 

**Lulu was named after that well-known Scottish singer: Sheena Easton.