Ceramic Wedding Favors That Double as Place Cards

A wedding favor and a place card usually arrive as two separate purchases: a little something on each setting, and a printed card with a name on it. The card has one job and one evening, then it comes off the table with the linen. At Tout en céramique, our studio in Le Vésinet just outside Paris, we make the two into one object. Laurence Brecher hand-paints each guest’s first name on a small glazed earthenware tile, the tile marks their seat during the dinner, and they take it home afterward. Ceramic wedding favors are 6 € a piece delivered to a US address, shipping and import duties included.

One object instead of two

The idea is almost embarrassingly simple: the place card is the favor. You are already paying for seating stationery, and you are already paying for something to put on each setting. Put the name on the object you were going to give anyway, and the second purchase disappears from your budget.

It also fixes the small awkwardness of the favor itself. A generic gift in a hundred identical copies is a nice gesture that belongs to no one in particular. A tile with someone’s first name painted on it belongs to that person and nobody else, from the moment they find their chair. It is personalized before it is unwrapped, because there is nothing to unwrap.

These are decorative pieces, not tableware. A tile is small, flat and quiet, so it can lean against a glass, sit on the napkin, or lie next to the cutlery without competing with the flowers.

Wedding favors guests will actually keep

We will not pretend to know what anyone does with a gift once they get home, and we would not believe a supplier who told you otherwise. What we can do is make an object that is worth keeping: a piece of ceramic, painted by hand, with a first name on it and nothing else. No logo, no thank-you slogan, nothing but the name and the decor you chose. It reads as a small painted object rather than as wedding merchandise, which is exactly the point.

That is the honest version of the phrase everyone searches for. Wedding favors guests will actually keep are not a category you can buy, they are the result of giving people something that already has their name on it.

Escort card favors or place card favors

The same tile does either job, and the difference is only where you put it.

As escort card favors, the tiles wait on a table near the entrance, grouped by table name or simply laid out in rows. Each guest picks up the one with their first name on their way in, and carries it to their seat. It turns a fairly administrative moment into the first small gift of the evening.

As personalized place card favors, the tiles are already set at each place when the doors open. Guests find their name as they arrive at the table, which is the classic version and the easiest one to photograph.

Either way, you choose the lettering and the colors, and the decor is matched to your wedding rather than picked from a catalog page: a sprig, a wave, an olive branch, a color repeated from the invitations, or nothing at all beyond the name.

Nothing is printed: each tile is painted one at a time

This is not a print run with a name dropped into a template. Laurence paints every tile herself, one after the other, with a brush. The color is glaze: the design is fired into the glaze in the kiln, so the name is part of the surface rather than sitting on top of it.

Painting a hundred tiles by hand means a hundred tiles that are almost, but not quite, identical. The letters breathe a little differently from one to the next. Each one is genuinely one of a kind, which is the thing a printer cannot give you at any price.

What 100 guests costs, in euros

Here is the arithmetic, plainly, with no rounding in our favor and no surprise at the end.

For a wedding of 100 guests, at 6 € a piece, the tiles come to 600 €. That is 6 € a guest, and it is the whole cost: the painting, the firing, the packing, the flight from Paris to your door and the US import duties are all inside the 6 €.

For a smaller wedding of 50 guests, it is 300 €, at the same 6 € a guest. The price per person does not move with the size of your list, so you can work out your budget from your guest count alone, before you talk to us.

What you will not find anywhere in that total is a delivery line, a customs charge or a handling fee added on arrival. Prices are shown in euros: your card issuer converts at the rate of the day, and we would rather not quote you a dollar figure we cannot promise.

The rest of the table, if you want it

The place card favors are the whole idea, and they work perfectly well on their own. Two other pieces from the same workbench can join them.

Ceramic table name tiles are painted one per table, the name calligraphed by hand and set on a small easel at the center. One table is one tile, at 69 € a piece delivered, with the shipping and the duties inside that figure like everything else here. Ten tables is ten tiles, so 690 € for the whole room. After the wedding they are easy to give to the witnesses and the parents, or to hang together at home as a small frieze.

If you want to give your guests something more substantial than a place marker, a larger keepsake tile is 29 € a piece delivered, shipping and duties included as well. Same studio, same hand, more room for a decor and a date. It is a different budget, so it tends to suit smaller guest lists.

Shipping to the United States, duties included

This is the part that usually goes wrong when you order from Europe, so we took it off the table entirely. Every price on this page is what you pay: the shipping from Le Vésinet and the US import duties are already counted inside each one, the 6 € place card included.

Nothing is charged when the box arrives. No customs invoice at the door, no fee to settle before the driver hands it over, no envelope from the carrier three weeks later. We pack the tiles ourselves and prepare the export paperwork, because that is our job and not yours.

When to order for your date

Each tile is painted by hand and then kiln-fired, so a full guest list takes a few weeks in the studio. Add about a week in transit across the Atlantic.

A wedding is planned months ahead, so the sensible rule is simple: order two months before the date, and three months if your guest list is still moving. That leaves room for the mock-up, for the painting, for the firing, for the crossing, and for the week before the wedding when you should be thinking about anything other than place cards. If your date is nearer than that, write to us anyway and we will tell you straight away what is possible.

See the first tile before you order anything

Send us a first name, or the whole list if you already have it, through our request form. We reply usually within the hour during Paris working hours, and we prepare a free mock-up of the first tile: the lettering, the colors, the decor, exactly as they will be painted. If you want the letters larger, the blue warmer or the sprig gone, we change it and send it back.

Only when you are happy with that first tile does the run start. If you are weighing up your favors right now, start with the mock-up of your ceramic place card favors and see the object before you decide anything.