Numbering a limited edition run

You may only need a pen

Ten pieces, sold at a market, to people standing in front of you. Write "3 / 10" on the label in ink and get on with your day. Nobody is going to audit it, and the numbers are doing what numbers in a small edition mostly do, which is make the object feel considered.

This guide is for the case where somebody might check. That happens sooner than makers expect: the first time a piece is resold, the first time two owners compare notes online, the first time a buyer asks whether number 14 of 12 is a typo.

The number is the easy part. The size is not.

Almost every problem with edition numbering is a problem with the denominator.

"7 of 50" is two claims. The first, that this is the seventh, is easy to keep true. The second, that there are exactly fifty, is a promise about the future that you are making before you have made the other forty-three. It binds you whatever happens: a sell-out, a restock request, a colourway you did not plan, a piece that comes back damaged.

So the real question is not how to number. It is what exactly is limited, and to what.

Decide the boundary before you mint anything

Three common boundaries, and they produce different objects.

Per product. Fifty of this design, across every colourway. Black number 7 and brown number 8 are both part of the same fifty. Simple to explain, and it means you cannot decide later to add a colourway without breaking the promise.

Per variant. Ten of this design in black, ten in brown. More flexible, and you have to say so clearly, because "1 of 10" on a black one when twenty exist in total will feel like a trick to somebody who finds out at resale.

Per release. Fifty in the spring drop, a separate fifty in the autumn one, each numbered from one. Legitimate and widely done. It also means two pieces in the world both stamped "1 of 50", so the release has to be part of how they are identified or the numbers stop distinguishing anything.

None of these is wrong. Picking one silently is.

Write the promise down, in your own words

Whichever boundary you chose, say it in the place a buyer will look, which is the product page and the certificate. Two sentences is enough.

This is one of fifty pieces of the Sequence Vessel, numbered 1 to 50 across all colourways. No further pieces of this design will be made in any colourway.

The second sentence is the one that matters, and it is the one to think about before you write it. It is the promise. If you would not be comfortable being held to it in three years, do not make it.

The four ways numbering goes wrong

Restarting at one

You make thirty, they sell, you make twenty more, and your system numbers the second run 1 to 20. Now there are two number sevens.

Numbering has to continue from what has already been issued for that boundary, not from the start of the current batch. Any system doing this for you should know what the last number was; if you are doing it by hand, the counter has to live somewhere other than your memory.

Numbering at the point of sale

Assigning the number when the order is packed feels tidy and it puts the numbering into the busiest, most error-prone moment of your week. Two orders packed by two people on a Friday is two number twelves.

Number at the point of make, or at the point the record is created, when there is one object in front of one person.

Reusing a number after a return

A piece comes back damaged and is destroyed. It is tempting to reissue its number to the next one, because otherwise the edition is one short.

Do not. A collector who bought number 12, saw it destroyed, and later finds another number 12 in circulation has learnt something bad about your record keeping. Retire the number and let the edition be forty-nine. If it matters, say what happened.

Letting the edition be exceeded

The one that ends careers. Fifty-one certificates for a fifty-piece edition, and both the fifty-first and one other are now impossible to distinguish from legitimate pieces.

This is worth an actual hard stop rather than a habit. If your system will let you mint the fifty-first, at some point somebody will. Provenance refuses a run that would take an edition past its size, and numbers continue from what that variant has already been minted rather than restarting, because both of these are failures nothing can repair afterwards.

Getting it onto the object

The number belongs on the object or its permanent label, not only on the paperwork. Paperwork is separated from objects constantly.
The certificate should read the number from your records rather than have it typed in. A template filled in by hand eventually carries the last customer's number.
Print a unique identifier as well as the number. "7 of 50" is not unique across your catalogue: there is a number 7 in every edition you have ever made. An identifier is what a lookup can actually key on. See how to give every item its own number.
If the record is checkable, say where. A number nobody can verify is decoration, which is fine, as long as you are not charging for the verification.

The awkward cases, briefly

Artist proofs and shop copies. Number them separately, AP 1/3, and count them in the total you disclose. An edition of fifty with five unlabelled extras is an edition of fifty-five that has been described as fifty.

A second colourway you did not plan. If you promised fifty across all colourways, the new colourway comes out of the fifty. If it cannot, you promised the wrong thing and the honest fix is to say so publicly rather than to quietly start a second sequence.

Made to order, indefinitely. Then it is not a limited edition and it should not carry a denominator. Number the pieces sequentially with no total, or give each one an identifier and no number at all. "Number 214" with nothing after it is a perfectly good thing for an object to say.

Someone asks for a specific number. Their birthday, a lucky number. Fine, if you are numbering at make and it is still unissued. Not fine if it means swapping two already-recorded pieces, because your register then says something that is not true.