Delivery & returns

Short version: ready-made pens go out within three working days and you have fourteen days to change your mind. Bespoke commissions are made to your specification, so that fourteen days doesn’t apply — which is why I’d rather over-explain before I start than disappoint you after.

Postage

Order value	Service	Cost	Typical time
Under £75	Royal Mail Tracked 48	£3.75	2–3 working days
£75 and over	Royal Mail Special Delivery Guaranteed, fully insured	Free	Next working day by 1pm

Anything over £75 goes out insured to its full value at my expense. It seems the least I can do when you’ve just spent a decent sum on something that only exists once.

Pens are posted in their presentation case inside a heavy-duty padded mailer — the proper rigid-lined sort, not the flimsy ones. For a single pen it protects better than a box and posts more cheaply, and I’ve never had one arrive damaged.

Scottish Highlands and Islands, Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands can take an extra day or two on both services. Royal Mail’s next-day guarantee doesn’t apply to every postcode up there — if yours is one of them and the timing matters, drop me a line before you order and I’ll tell you honestly what to expect.

I don’t currently post outside the UK. If you’re abroad and want one of these, email me and I’ll work out what it would cost.

When it will arrive

• Ready-made pens — posted within three working days of your order, usually sooner.
• Bespoke commissions — allow four weeks from the point we agree the specification. I travel a fair bit for photography, which is what sets that figure; if you need it sooner, ask, because it can often be brought forward.

Changing your mind

Ready-made pens

Under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 you have fourteen days from receiving the pen to tell me you want to cancel, and a further fourteen days to send it back. You don’t need a reason. Email me at Mike@ardenpenco.co.uk and I’ll confirm the return address.

The pen needs to come back in the condition it arrived in. You can handle and inspect it as you would in a shop — but a pen that’s been inked, carried and used for a fortnight isn’t in that condition, and I may reduce the refund to reflect it.

I’ll refund within fourteen days of the pen reaching me, to the card you paid with, including the outbound postage you paid. I’ll cover the return postage too — email me and I’ll send you a label. Most sellers make you pay that; it seems a mean way to treat someone who simply changed their mind.

Bespoke commissions

Anything made to your specification — a pen configured through the configurator, a Hampton, or a pen turned from wood you sent me — is exempt from the fourteen-day right to cancel. That exemption exists in the Regulations precisely because a thing made to one person’s requirements usually can’t be sold to anyone else.

In practice: once I’ve cut into your grandfather’s apple tree, there’s no undoing it. So I’ll confirm every detail with you in writing first, and you can walk away at no cost right up to the point I start. After that we’re committed together.

Either way

Your statutory rights are untouched by any of the above. If a pen arrives faulty, damaged or not as described, tell me and I’ll put it right — repair, replacement or refund. That applies regardless of whether it was made to order, and there’s no time limit on me standing behind my own work.

If it goes wrong later

These are made to be used for decades. If a mechanism fails, a thread wears or a finish dulls after years of honest use, send it back. Most things I can put right, and I’d far rather do that than have a pen of mine sitting in a drawer broken.