Nobody remembers the gift. Everybody remembers the song.

The first song we ever made was not for a customer. It was for a grandmother turning eighty, and we had left the shopping far too late to fix it with a scarf.

So we did the only thing we knew how to do. We asked her family for the small things — the name she gave her car, the tune she hummed while cooking, the particular way she answers the telephone. We wrote it all down, put a melody underneath it, and sang it back to her in a living room that smelled of cake.

She cried before the first chorus. So, embarrassingly, did everyone else. And at the end of the night somebody asked, quite quietly, whether we could do one for their dad.

That is the whole company, really. We built the tools so it no longer takes three weeks, a borrowed piano and a very patient friend. But the job has not changed at all: you tell us about a person, and we hand you back something only that person could have been given.

We are not trying to make the most songs. We are trying to make the one that is still being played years later — in the car, at the party, on a bad Tuesday in February — long after the wrapping paper has gone out with the recycling.