stiftart

stiftart's own homepage names wedding invitations once, 4th in a 5-item list of things Barbara Heri says she can letter: menu boards, sandwich boards, product labels, wedding invitations, personalised company gifts. Her actual portfolio, sitting a click away on the same offerings page, tells a narrower and more specific story. 2 of its gallery photos are captioned for a wedding: one "Tischplan Hochzeit" (a wedding seating plan) and one "Namenskärtchen Hochzeit1" (wedding place cards), both uploaded to the gallery in the same second, timestamped 14 February 2022, evidently from 1 real booking rather than 2 unrelated ones. No invitation, save-the-date or envelope shows up anywhere in that gallery. What stiftart has actually shown doing for a wedding is table and name lettering for the day itself, not the paper that goes out beforehand, and that gap between the sales copy and the photographed work is worth knowing before anyone emails Heri about a full suite.

Heri runs the business from Gerlafingen, a village in canton Solothurn, and her tagline reads "schöne Schriften von Hand & mit Herz," beautiful lettering by hand and with heart. The line underneath it is more useful than the tagline: "Tafelbeschriftungen, Handlettering (auch für Kinder) und Kalligrafie in der Region Solothurn/Schweiz," board lettering, hand lettering including for children, and calligraphy, in the Solothurn region of Switzerland. That is the actual trade. Wedding stationery is a request that fits somewhere inside it, not a service stiftart sells on its own terms.

6 categories, and real Solothurn names behind them

stiftart's offerings page groups everything into 6 named categories, and none of them is called weddings. Tafeln covers chalkboards, pitched as "Kundenstopper" sandwich boards and "Menütafeln" menu boards meant to draw customers in before they reach the door. Schiefer is slate as a material, sold as suited to labelling products in shops, on buffets or on counters, in what the page calls almost any size and shape. Papier means nib and ink on quality paper, or white lettering on transparent paper, described only as fitting "many occasions" without saying which; no printing press, foil stamping or letterpress is named anywhere on this page or any other page on the site, so the paper work reads as hand-drawn piece by piece, the same as the boards. Holz und mehr extends the same white lettering onto wood, and, the page adds, onto metal, stone and glass such as a shop window. Digitales is the one category built around a screen rather than a physical surface, and Kurse und Coachings is teaching rather than commissioned work.

The gallery attached to that page backs the Tafeln and Schiefer categories with named, checkable local jobs: chalkboard lettering for Restaurant Da Monaco, for a shop called Chocola in Solothurn, for a bulk-goods shop trading as "puro unverpackt," a board for "EMK Gerlafingen" (the village's Methodist congregation), a sign for a secondhand clothing shop called Kleidergarten, and signage done for a kindergarten and for an organisation named Rückenwind plus. None of that is wedding work, but it is the strongest evidence on the whole site that stiftart is a working local sign-writer with a real client list, not a one-page hobby site dressed up with stock photography.

What a wedding actually gets, and what it costs

Go back to the 2 wedding photos and there is nothing to read past the captions: no price, no lead time, no note on whether Heri designs the seating layout herself or works from a couple's own list of names and tables. That silence matches the rest of the commissioned side of the business. Tafeln, Schiefer, Papier and Holz und mehr all describe what the material and finish look like; none of the 4 states a price, a minimum order, or how long a board, a slate sign or a hand-lettered card takes to turn around. A couple who wants a wedding seating plan lettered the way the gallery photo shows one has to ask directly what that costs and how long it takes. The site gives no figure to check that answer against.

The one wedding-adjacent product with a real price

There's exactly one commissioned item on the whole site with a published price, a stated process and a stated lead time, and it isn't an invitation: the "Personalisiertes Poster," a made-to-order name poster at CHF 65.00. Its own product description names weddings directly: a poster made "für Teenager, Kinderzimmer, frisch Verheiratete oder zum runden Geburtstag," for teenagers, a nursery, newlyweds or a milestone birthday, with a family version also possible. Every poster carries lettering Heri writes by hand herself on an iPad with an Apple Pencil, then has printed, so the type on it exists nowhere else. Ordering one means filling in 2 text fields, a name-and-detail block and a wishes block, each capped at 200 characters, plus a size chosen from a dropdown and a quantity. Returns are explicitly ruled out because the piece is made entirely to the buyer's own wishes, but the page balances that with an actual proofing step: a layout proposal a customer has to approve before anything goes to print. It also names a lead time in plain language, "ca. 3 Wochen," about 3 weeks from order to delivery. Of everything stiftart offers a wedding, this is the only piece with numbers a couple can actually plan a timeline around.

Courses, and a teacher's second trade

Kurse und Coachings is the 6th category, sold as a group course, one-to-one coaching or a booking for a team event. Heri has no course venue of her own, so sessions run at different locations, and the page states a running total: "über 450 Teilnehmer*innen," over 450 participants, so far. Her own about page is direct about what stiftart is and isn't: "Das ist zwar nicht mein Beruf (ich bin Lehrerin), aber meine grösste Leidenschaft," this isn't my job, I'm a teacher, but it's my biggest passion. She names the training behind the craft, courses taken at different-design.ch, halfapx.com, handherzwerk.ch, letteraetc.ch and stefankunz.com, and traces the interest back to growing up next to a restaurant and disliking its badly lettered sandwich boards as a teenager. The Impressum confirms the business isn't required to register for VAT, consistent with a side trade run around a teaching job rather than a full-time studio with staff.

A ready-made shelf, and what it doesn't include

Alongside the commissioned work, stiftart runs a small online shop, 79 products by the site's own sitemap, spread across 13 categories: Easter cards, birth posters, notepads, stickers, seed cards, sympathy cards, A6 cards, kraft-paper cards, card sets, slate boards, gift tags, vouchers and a sale bin. Sample prices from the shop page: kraft-paper cards from CHF 3.50, notepads between CHF 4.00 and CHF 6.00, a perpetual calendar at CHF 25.00, and the CHF 65.00 poster already covered above. Every order ships at a cost calculated in the cart, or, the page notes, can also be collected in person. None of the 13 categories is a wedding category, and none of the 79 product URLs in the sitemap contains the word "hochzeit." The most recent product on that sitemap was updated 23 June 2026, about 2 months before this listing was checked, a better sign the shop is actually running than the copyright line in the footer, which still reads 2022 on every page.

None of this makes stiftart a wedding stationer in any conventional sense, and the site never claims otherwise past that one line on the homepage. What it does show, in named local jobs and 2 dated gallery photos, is a working sign-writer in Solothurn who has lettered at least one real wedding's table plan and place cards by hand, and who will build a hand-written name poster for newlyweds inside a stated 3-week window for CHF 65.00. Past that, a full invitation suite, a price for a bespoke board or a Papier commission, service in a language other than German, there is nothing published to check against. Ask before assuming, and expect the answer by email rather than on the page.