Custom-Inscribed Chopsticks

We print any message that fits, in any quantity, with attractive sleeves, and deliver them quickly. We pay meticulous attention to every detail of your order.

Make your celebration all the more memorable with these custom chopsticks. Great for

weddings
bar mitzvahs
banquets

Your guests will re-live the glow of your celebration every time they pick up your special chopsticks.

Custom-inscribed chopsticks also make great

souvenirs
advertising

We put your message on high-quality melamine chopsticks that stay good-looking and useful, month-in, month-out. Melamine has a clean, quality look and feel. Melamine is a polymer that most people call a “plastic”. It’s great for food use, because nothing sticks to it. It’s awful for printing on for exactly the same reason: nothing sticks to it, including ink. We have a special proprietary process that makes our ink stick to melamine. Our chopsticks are 10¾ inches long. The printable area is 4 inches (100 mm) long.

We imprint your chopsticks with the sharpest silk-screening, for a startlingly detailed image. Engraved chopsticks, as found in many restaurants, have much-duller images. Their color fades in just a few washings, while ours holds month after month. We were told that the minimum order for melamine engraved chopsticks is half-a-million – an awful lot of chopsticks, with not-very-good engraving.

Styrene plastic chopsticks are OK for table use, but imprinting often comes off with the slightest nudge of a fingernail. If you use them for cooking, they melt in a stir-fry! That ruins the chopsticks, the food, and the cook’s mood – and leaves the stump, with your imprint on it, in the angry cook’s hand.

Wood chopsticks and bamboo chopsticks are cheap. Some companies cut or burn lettering into them, but they look cut or burnt. After the first use, the tips turn yucky – not what you want your image on.

Any Quantity: We imprint your chopsticks pair-by-pair, so we can make the quantity you really want, even if it is not a round number. If you really want 213 pairs, order 213 pairs and we’ll deliver 213 pairs.

Paper Sleeves: Our sleeves show off the imprinted handles. We make each pair’s sleeve from conventional paper – any color in our local paper store. “Good-Luck Red” is always in stock. We can imprint paper sleeves with the Chinese characters for “double happiness” or “long life”, or the Japanese kanji “kotobuki”, on each sleeve. For any other message, lend us a hand-stamp.

Click on images for a larger view

Clear Poly Sleeves: We also use polyethylene sleeves, inserting a 2 x 11-inch sheet with any message you print on it. We use them for our souvenir chopsticks, as in the yellow image farther down this page.

Client: Atlas PyroVision	Graphics: Ginger Mountain, Mountain Design Group, <mtdesign {at} net1plus.com>

Sleeveless: If you don’t want any sleeves, lower the quoted price by 10¢/pair, in any quantity. This also speeds up our turnaround time, because we have less work to do.

Fast Service: All orders under 5,000 pairs ship less than 2 weeks after we receive them. For larger orders, the first 5,000 pairs ship within 2 weeks.

The best brides and grooms work together like a pair of chopsticks. We symbolize this in our new hit style with the bride’s name on one stick and the groom’s on the other. Wow your guests with special chopsticks for your special event. They’ll keep them, and remember you.

With our chopsticks, you can pick up customers! Chopsticks with your message are

catchy,
novel,
appreciated,
long-lasting,
compact,
and economical.

Customers may not keep your brochure, but they always know where their chopsticks are. These chopsticks are so outstanding that the San Jose Mercury-News wrote a whole article about them, and chopstick collectors feature them.

When Blue Shield of California handed them out at the San Francisco Chinese New Year Festival, their booth was thronged more than any other. Crowds waded 5-deep to get them, management brought in stanchions to snake the crowd in a more orderly way, organizers closed the booth for half an hour to dissipate the crowd, and chopsticks were given away so fast that the last shift of volunteers had to be turned back home because there was nothing left for them to hand out.

Could your organization use such marketing?

We can supply your chopsticks in bulk, or sleeve them in pairs, and even insert literature. We will deliver the quantity you want at the time you want them. Contact us to make an impression on your Asian customers.

Here’s what our customers say:

From Olivia: “The chopsticks are beautiful! Thank you for customizing the order with the special paper for sleeves and the 2 different mailing addresses.”

From Michael: “The chopsticks arrived in plenty of time and they were absolutely a smash hit. The font and color looked great. They really helped to make our banquet a real celebration. Many guests shyly asked for an extra pair to take home, which was fine with us. Thank you for your great work. You were a pleasure to do business with. My youngest daughter has already asked if we can order sticks for her. I’ll be in touch.”

Prices per pair

to print in any one color on one side of each ivory-colored chopstick:

We have not changed prices since 1999, and will not change unless expenses force us to.

Our supplier always stocks ivory, red, green, and black chopsticks, and sometimes yellow and orange chopsticks. If you want yellow or orange, we will find out availability and price. If you can tell us about more reliable suppliers, we’d love to learn about them. We especially seek a reliable bulk supply of melamine Japanese-shape chopsticks.

Printing on 2 sides of each chopstick is possible, but since it takes nearly double the work, the price is nearly double. Inquire for pricing.

To order:

Please snail-mail us a black-and-white printout (“paper proof” or “camera-ready copy”) showing EXACTLY how you want everything on your chopsticks. We photograph that paper to make our silkscreen. We can zoom it down to fit, but that’s the only change we make. If you print it out on a computer, please make several sizes from, say, 12 points to 36 points, and we’ll select the one that works best with our system. Because you set all the type, we’re sure to produce exactly what you want. In our first 5 years we imprinted 9 different languages.

Please don’t eMail us the text, because computers often mis-interpret one another, especially regarding fonts, even in .pdfs. Please don’t fax us the text, because faxing breaks smooth lines into jagged segments that don’t look good.

Tell us which color of chopsticks you want, and what color of ink to print on them with. We can match the ink to any PMS color, or a swatch you send.

Also, enclose a down-payment for 50% of the expected total. The only other charges are the actual cost of shipping (UPS ground service within the US is roughly 11¢/pair) and, only in California, 8.25% state sales tax. We accept PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, checks, and money orders. Local customers can hand us cash.

We sell souvenir chopsticks

both wholesale and retail. Our San Francisco Chinatown chopsticks make a perfect memento of one of the world’s favorite cities, and one of its most distinctive districts. We commissioned exclusive artwork by E. J. Barnes just for these chopsticks. Notice how the curves of the dragon and bridge work together, and how the waves and scales work together. Each pair comes wrapped in our clear poly sleeve.

One pair: $4.95 + $1 shipping.
Wholesale: 10 pairs or more @$2.47/pair, + actual shipping cost.
We will happily develop other distinctive souvenir chopsticks.

We thought left-handed chopsticks were a joke, until we made some and learned how not to.

The sticks themselves don’t care which hand holds them, of course. But the printing on them faces different ways, depending on how they’re held.

Many people envision the sticks being held vertically, with the text vertical, from the thick end downward. Some customers have their sticks printed that way. But most people eat with chopsticks in their right hands. The angle is more horizontal than vertical. When we put the thick end to the right and run the text horizontally, ending near the thick end, the writing is easiest for right-handers to read.

When we put the thick end to the left and run the text horizontally, starting near the thick end (as we did on our first try), left-handed users read the text easily, but for right-handers it is upside down.

We produce whatever the customer wants. When a customer asks for something we wonder about, we double-check to make sure of what they really want.

Norman Sperling
Everything in the Universe
413 Poinsettia Avenue
San Mateo, CA 94403 USA
+1 650-573-7125
nsperling@california.com