For those who may be new here, Lifetime Creations is a family-run personalized gift company based in Merrillville, Indiana. Since 2007, we’ve been creating custom engraved and embroidered gifts that help people celebrate meaningful moments, milestones, and memories. Every order we ship is personalized for the customer, and every gift is crafted one at a time by our team — which is exactly why what happened last Monday was such a surreal moment for us.

Monday, October 27th started like any other Monday. Late in the morning I was checking through orders when something caught my eye — a huge spike in sales of our personalized passport covers on Amazon.

At first, I honestly thought something was wrong. Passport covers aren’t exactly one of our top-selling items, and the sudden rush made me wonder if we were being hit with some kind of e-commerce glitch or fraud. I walked over to our office staff and asked our team, half-jokingly, “How would we know if we were going viral?”

Gianna, who answers our phones, looked up and said, “That’s weird… we just got a call from some guy saying he had video from The Today Show he wanted to sell us.” She figured it was a spam call — it didn’t make any sense.

At that point, none of us knew. We had no idea our products had just been featured on The Today Show. NBC never reached out, never asked for samples, never gave us a heads-up. They had simply purchased several of our passport covers — just like any other customer — and included them in their on-air segment.

A little later, we stumbled across this page on the Today Show website. There it was — our Lifetime Creations personalized passport covers, right on the page.

Pretty cool, right?

But the story got even better. Gianna called that mystery number back and learned that our products weren’t just mentioned online — they were actually featured live on The Today Show, around 9:50 a.m. Eastern. By the time I found out, we had just missed it airing in the Central Time Zone.

Cue the frantic scramble to find a replay. I checked everywhere — NBC, Peacock, local stations — even tried to catch it live on the West Coast feed. No luck. The whole team was buzzing; we just wanted to see it with our own eyes.

Eventually, Evie was the hero of the day. She found the clip posted online, and we gathered everyone — even our newly hired seasonal team — into the office to watch it together. 

I didn’t even preview it first. I wanted everyone to watch it together at the same exact moment. I fumbled with the video (clicked play too many times so the player froze, accidentally hit the function lock button so I couldn’t get the volume up… the usual). Finally it played.  Just over one minute into the segment, there it was: Lifetime Creations on The Today Show. 

Arielle shouted, “Hey, I remember making those!” and everyone laughed.

The wildest part? Those exact passport covers — ordered on Friday, October 17th — had to ship out by Monday, October 20th. Monday, October 20th also happens to be the day Amazon Web Services went down nationwide. As an e-commerce business, we rely on a variety of digital systems, many of which were down that day. Still, when we set our handling times, we make a commitment to our customers that the order they place will arrive when we say it will.

Our shipping systems were down for the day, but our team didn’t miss a beat. One by one, we manually created labels and pushed every order out — including that one — without any idea one of those packages were bound for national TV.

We don’t have the largest catalog in the industry, but what we do, we do well. We always tell our team that you never know who is going to receive an order. Every order is special to the person receiving it. The team didn’t need any special instructions — they did what they do best. They made high-quality personalized passport covers, shipped them on time, and delivered exactly what the customer wanted.

Seeing our products featured on The Today Show was an incredible moment for our entire company — a reminder that the hard work, attention to detail, and care we put into every order truly matters. What started as a normal Monday ended with us watching our company’s name on national television.

And honestly — that’s pretty amazing.

Nick
President, Lifetime Creations

Shop our personalized passport covers:
https://www.lifetimecreations.net/passport-covers/