Epic Merchandise Blog

Less than two weeks until Christmas… don’t panic! You still have time to buy those last minute Christmas gifts.

Here at Epic Merchandise, one of the things we pride ourselves on the most is our fast shipping – we ship the personalized gifts line in just three business days or less. With just three business days of processing your gift, and five more business days of shipping, you MAY even be able to use Ground shipping if you place your order today.

However, since we’re sure you want your personalized Christmas gift to get to your recipient on time, we strongly recommend checking the posted dates below each order box. We give you options for expedited delivery if needed. Order by the dates posted, using the shipping method listed, and it means your gift will arrive just before Christmas – perfect timing!

Now that we’ve solved the issue of shipping, and “will it get there on time,” let’s give you some ideas for those last minute Christmas gifts.

1. Christmas ornaments are always a favorite. They can be personalized with your engraved message and a seasonal image and shipped quickly.

2. Christmas picture frames are a classic gift. They come in several designs and you can personalize them with a message or with the recipient’s name.

3. A personalized Christmas candle will brighten your recipient’s holiday season. The warm glow, highlighted by the recipient’s family name or your special message makes it a beautiful gift and very appropriate for anyone who celebrates Christmas.

4. There’s no need to limit yourself to Christmas-themed gifts. We offer many options when it comes to personalized gifts, including year-round favorites such as personalized beer mugs, an engraved wine bottle stopper, a cherry finish keepsake box, and many more.

With quick shipping, these gifts can get there just in time for Christmas. But don’t waste another minute! Visit our website today and place your order so that we can get the ball rolling on those personalized Christmas gifts.

Merry Christmas!

Wind chimes are chimes constructed from suspended tubes. They are usually hung outside of a building or house and are intended to be played by the wind. Sound can be produced when the tubes come in contact with a suspended central clapper, in the form of a ball or horizontal disk, or with each other. Wind chimes may also be used to observe changes in wind direction, depending on where they are hung.

Wind chimes make a beautiful house warming gift, whether you buy them for someone else or for yourself! The beautiful outdoor sound of quality wind chimes is treasured by everyone. They produce a tranquil, relaxing effect and make any house feel like a welcoming home. Wind chimes can also help with masking noises such as street or traffic noise.

Wind chimes are a popular Feng Shui tool, used for purification, protection and to enhance a room’s energy. Sound is one of the most powerful and popular Feng Shui cures, used for everything from increasing popularity to protecting a home or business from intruders. Wind chimes are not only effective Feng Shui remedies for a myriad of problems, they are also pleasing to both the eye and the ear, making them one of the most commonly used Feng Shui tools.

Epic Merchandise is a personalized gifts store that offers, among other items, high quality wind chimes. The beautiful, rich sound our wind chimes produce is a result of meticulous handmade craftsmanship. Each wind chime is crafted and tuned by a musician. But you don’t need to take our word… you are invited to listen to your wind chimes before you buy, and hear the quality for yourself!

All wind chime tunings are in the Key of C. Wind Chimes are handcrafted from thick tempered aluminum tubing with a soft brushed finish. Best of all, you get a free engraved wind plate of your choice. Many of our customers choose to engrave their, or the recipient’s, last name on the wind plate, but you can engrave anything you’d like, including inspirational phrases.

Visit our store today to order your set of high-quality, engraved wind chimes

Gift giving is not always easy. We are all pressed for time, always busy, and yet we want to give people – especially our loved ones and the people we truly care about – meaningful gifts.

If meaningful gift giving is important to you, follow these tips:

Take Notes

It’s very helpful to keep notes throughout the year. If your child talks about a toy she really wants, write it down. If a client mentions a book he’s been meaning to read, make a note of that too. When the time comes to buy a gift, those lists will prove priceless in helping you buy gifts that the recipients will actually enjoy.

Make it Personalized

Buying a personalized gift is one of the easiest ways to give true personal meaning to a gift and to make it unique. It’s no wonder engraved gifts are so popular. They’re the best way to make sure the gift feels truly personal.

Give a Gift That Expresses Your Relationship with the Recipient

Generic gifts such as gift cards, flowers or chocolate are okay, but they are not as thoughtful as a gift that is geared specifically toward the gift recipient.

For example, if your client is an avid golfer, you can’t do much better than buying him a personalized golf putter set. If your friend likes to slowly sip from her soda can throughout the day, get her a pink can cooler engraved with her name – what a cool gift!

Give Something They Would Never Get for Themselves

While practical gifts are not necessarily a bad idea, sometimes the best gifts are those that are pure fun or indulgence – something the gift recipient would never buy for themselves.

Epic Merchandise is a personalized gifts store that offers high quality products, affordable prices and great service. Visit us today to select the best personalized gift for someone special in your life.

An engraved memorial pet stone is a lasting way to remember the special love you shared with your pet. Most pet owners share an intense emotional connection with their pet. As a result, the loss of a pet can be extremely painful and trigger overwhelming emotions of loss and sadness.

The hardest part is that unlike losing a human, people who are not pet owners sometimes tend to devalue your feelings about your pet by saying things like “it was just a pet, you should get over it.”

Creating a memorial in your home where you keep a symbol of your relationship with your pet is very comforting, for you and, if you have kids, for your children. One of the best ways to do this is by getting an engraved pet memorial stone and reserving a special place in your garden for remembering the dear pet that holds a special place in your heart.

While you can certainly purchase a pre-engraved stone with a standard message, these standard memorial stones can’t really compare to a deeply personal message that you have written yourself and that contains the pet’s name, their dates of birth and passing, and even their photo.

Epic Merchandise, a personalized gifts store that focuses on providing high quality products and reliable customer service, offers a collection of dog memorial stones and cat stepping stones. Our collection allows you to create the perfect memorial stone for your pet.

Just like your pet, each memorial stone we offer is unique, and hand finished with care. Your pet’s name and date are included with every stone. Custom pet memorial stones with special messages are also available.

Of course, engraved pet memorial stones make an incredibly thoughtful gift for grieving pet owners.

An engraved garden stone is a beautiful gift. It is unique, and it shows the recipient you cared enough to consider their personality and interests before buying the gift.

People love to give and receive engraved garden stones, because the personal message on the stones makes the recipient feel important. If someone actually took the time to think about a message that would be meaningful to me, that person must really care about me!

Engraved stones for the garden are a special, personal gift that will last a lifetime. They can celebrate and commemorate special events such as backyard weddings, anniversaries, and other important milestones.

Epic Merchandise offers beautifully engraved stones and rocks, each personalized and ready for your garden. Each stone is a unique, one-of-a-kind piece of nature, so colors, shapes, and sizes will vary.

You decide on the text or the image that goes on the stone. When it comes to engraved rocks and stones, if you can imagine it, we can engrave it! You get to choose the stone, font, words and images. Each stone is deeply engraved by hand, and engraving is highlighted in black.

The result is a truly personal gift, since there is going to be no other stone like it. This is so much more meaningful than choosing from a limited selection of pre-engraved garden stones, as is often the case.

Engraved garden stones make the perfect gift for that special person in your life who has everything. They are a beautiful way to convey a loving message to someone you truly care about. Visit Epic Merchandise today to order your engraved garden stone.

Ten Beautiful Friendship Quotes

I expected writing a “quotes” post to be fairly easy, but as it turns out, when it comes to friendship, there are so many beautiful quotes out there, that picking the best ones is tough.

Friendship is defined as co-operative and supportive behavior between two or more people. Friends respect each other, enjoy each other’s company, and help each other out in times of need. Friendship is considered one of the central human experiences, and has been sanctified by all major religions.

The following are ten of my favorite friendship quotes.

1. “It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson. I love this quote because it is so true. Think about it: how many people in your life will forgive you if you act stupid, or if you’re not at your best? Most of them won’t forgive you. Your true friends will.

2. “It is not so much our friends’ help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us.” – Epicurus.

3. “One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives.” – Euripides. There are many other quotes that point out that friendship is a true choice, and thus is more valuable, in a way, than family ties.

4. “Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend’s success.” – Oscar Wilde. Hard to admit, but so true.

5. “Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.” – Aristotle.

6. “Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with.” – Mark Twain.

7. “Do not save your loving speeches
For your friends till they are dead;
Do not write them on their tombstones,
Speak them rather now instead.” – Anna Cummins. Have you told a friend that you love them today?

8. “A friend to all is a friend to none.” – Aristotle.

9. “Be slow in choosing your friends; slower in changing.” -Benjamin Franklin.

10. “Friendship? Yes Please.” -Charles Dickens. I’ll have one too.

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Epic Merchandise offers a large, affordable selection of personalized gifts. Epic Merchandise provides you with great service and high quality products at very competitive prices. Shop with us and you’ll see why you can depend on our service, and count on your savings.

Photo credit: Stu Seeger

Friendships today are very different than friendships in the past. While more and more people complain that they are having a hard time keeping in touch with their real-life friends, because everyone is so busy these days, modern life is giving us tools, from e-mail to social networks, that enable us to keep in touch with people who just a decade ago would have disappeared from our lives.

And while real-life connections often end when a person moves away or changes jobs, online connections can stay active for years, unless we physically remove the person from our online network. Think about it: when was the last time you met someone new? Is that person on one of your online networks now? And how likely are you to see them again in real life?

When I ask myself these questions, the answers are clear: I am very likely to add most new contacts to one of my online networks (Facebook or Twitter). Many times, I never see that person again in real life – but I continue to see their avatar and interact with them, admittedly on a somewhat shallow level, online.

Some people argue that online networks dilute the term “friend” and bring it to absurdity – we use the term to describe relationships that are far too shallow to be considered true friendship. While this is true, I would like to argue that in many cases, online connections offer a great deal of support to people who are otherwise fairly isolated. A good example is that of a new mom who doesn’t have mom friends in her physical community, but enjoys support from an online community of mothers.

Above all, it’s important to acknowledge that never before in history has it been so easy to keep up with so many people with whom you otherwise would have lost contact. And while an online friendship may not be as deep as a real-life one, these friendships do add value to our lives and enrich them.

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Epic Merchandise offers a large, affordable selection of personalized gifts. Epic Merchandise provides you with great service and high quality products at very competitive prices. Shop with us and you’ll see why you can depend on our service, and count on your savings.

Photo credit: Alexey Avdeev

When it comes to choosing a mate, opposites really do attract, according to a Brazilian study that found people are subconsciously more likely to choose a partner whose genetic make-up is different than their own.

This was likely an evolutionary strategy to ensure healthy reproduction, because genetic variability is an advantage for offspring. Parents with dissimilar genes provide their offspring with a better chance to ward infections off, because their immune system genes are more diverse.

The idea of “opposites attract” can be found in the Chinese philosophy of Yin and Yang, which is based on the celestial calendar, but is often associated with opposites which together form a whole. Yin means “moon” while Yang means “sun.” Yin represents woman while Yang represents man. According to the Yin Yang philosophy, Yin can’t exist without Yang and Yang can’t exist with Yin. Together the opposites attract and complement each other.

On a more basic level, there’s certainly an attraction in what’s different. Many people are attracted to their opposite simply because it’s fascinating and exciting to experience someone so different than they are.

Even if there are powerful biological, reproductive and psychological reasons for choosing a partner who’s very different than you are, a relationship between two opposites is challenging. For example, if you are an extrovert and he is an introvert, conflict might arise when you want to go out and have fun every night while he almost always prefers to stay home.

When a person is a strong opposite of you, the relationship will be under stress more often than if the person is very similar to you. However, this doesn’t mean the relationship can’t work: open communication, flexibility and a mutual willingness to compromise can go a long way in helping smooth out the inevitable bumps along the road.

It’s important to realize, that in many cases, a couple who seems like opposites are actually quite similar. For example, one of them may be an extrovert while the other is an introvert, but they may share other important traits in common, such as interests, philosophies, and values.

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Epic Merchandise offers a large, affordable selection of engraved gifts. Epic Merchandise provides you with great service and high quality products at very competitive prices. Shop with us and you’ll see why you can depend on our service, and count on your savings.

Photo credit: Ralph Bijker