How CLScottishDesigns titles its Scots sayings for gift shoppers

CLScottishDesigns makes Scottish prints and cards with a wee bit of personality. Most of the range is bold typography built around everyday Scots: Awrite Pal, Gie It Laldy, Keep the Heid, There's Nae Place Like Hame. Prints come in A5, A4 and A3 on heavyweight matte paper, and the birthday and Christmas cards carry the same banter and come with an envelope.

Next to the sayings sits a heritage range. Clan tartan prints set a family's modern tartan inside a map of Scotland with the clan name, motto and traditional region, and a personalised version adds a surname, a date and a heart over a place that matters. If a buyer's name isn't in the range yet, the shop will happily make one. CLScottishDesigns has made more than 500 sales since it opened.

A saying like Aff Tae See A Man Aboot A Dug is the whole product. It's what makes someone laugh, and it's what makes the print worth giving. It is also a phrase few shoppers would think to type. Someone buying a housewarming present for a Scottish friend might start with Scottish wall art, a funny dog print or a Scotland gift.

That leaves every title with two jobs. It has to carry the saying, because the saying is the design, and it has to say plainly what the thing is: a print or a card, what's on it, where it might hang. Some of the earlier titles were built around the saying and the download sizes, a natural way to describe a digital file, and said less about the print itself.

The work happens in Alura's listing editor, one listing at a time. Each listing there carries a Listing score, with grades for the photos, title, description and tags.

For titles, the shop takes AI suggestions on most listings and types its own on others. Either way the pattern mostly holds: the saying or subject leads, and a plain description follows. Aff Tae See A Man Aboot A Dug took an AI suggestion that kept the saying and added Funny Dog Print. Awrite Pal was rewritten by hand, swapping the download sizes for Scottish Wall Art and Scotland Print.

Tags got the same treatment. On the dog print, a few general Scottish tags made way for dog lover wall art, dog illustration and hallway wall print, so the tags describe the picture as well as the joke. AI also drafts the alt text for the photos, the short descriptions that screen readers use.

None of it reaches Etsy until the shop clicks Publish changes. A suggestion that drops the Scots or sounds stiff can be edited or thrown out first.

The bundle listing, where buyers choose 1, 3 or 5 typography prints, raised a sharper question: should the title call them Scottish slang or Scottish wall art? The shop set up an A/B test in Alura instead of picking one. Variant A kept the original title, Scottish Wall Art Bundle | Modern Typography Prints | Funny Scotland Home Decor. Variant B led with Scottish Slang Bundle.

Alura switched the live Etsy listing between the two titles on a schedule, so every shopper saw one version at a time, and compared sales and revenue for each version. When the test ended, the Scottish Wall Art title stayed on the listing, and it is still there. The slang is on every print in the bundle.

The edited titles follow one pattern. The saying or subject comes first, then plain words for what it is and where it might go. The Scots is still in every saying print. What's new is the description beside it.

The heritage prints moved the same way. On the Wallace clan print, the title now reads Wallace Tartan Print, the words a family member might put together in a search, with Scottish Clan Poster further along. The listing picked up a wallace tartan tag at the same time, and the description now opens with the same phrase.

For any shop with a voice of its own, the advice is simple. Keep the phrase, pun or name that makes the product yours, and put it first. Then add the plain words a gift shopper would use for the same thing. And when a buyer asks for something you don't stock yet, like a surname missing from the tartan range, make it for them.