Your Own Ceramic Coffee Mug

The ceramic coffee mug is an everyday staple that can be found in any kitchen. Many are just your basic, boring, white or black cup designed purely for function. 

Other mugs come in all shapes, sizes, styles and some people even have collections of mugs from the different places they’ve traveled or events they’ve participated in. A ceramic coffee mug makes a great keepsake for weddings or other special events and can serve as a fantastic memento from a trip. The thing that makes a coffee mug a great keepsake is that it also doubles as a useful everyday item.

Years ago you could visit a kiosk in the mall and have a mug custom made and personalized with a picture or a special saying. The kiosks still exist for the technophobes among us, but now you don’t even have to go through the effort of getting into your car and going to the shopping mall to create a unique personalized mug.

As long as you have an internet connection and the ability to upload pictures from your hard drive, you can have a ceramic coffee mug personalized from the comfort of your own home in any color or style you like.

• Check out CafePress.com for your own personalized coffee mugs, photo coffee mugs, logo coffee mugs, and a whole bunch of other personalized stuff.

The best personalized mug I’ve seen in someone’s kitchen was a mug with a picture of a baby eating chocolate cake with his hands, and the only way you could tell there was a baby in the picture was by the outline of his head and the whites of his eyes—the only things in the picture not covered in frosting.

Personalizing a ceramic coffee mug is also an inexpensive way to advertise your business. Most people have a collection of mismatched coffee mugs in their kitchen cabinets and what better way to get your message across than to have your business logo in your customer’s face every morning as they drink their coffee.

Have a camera ready business logo? Get a logo coffee mug. Call it a promotional coffee mug and hand a few out. To see this everyday item used as a marketing tool witness the sheer volume of items like pens and pads of paper floating around in the world with the name of a prescription drug or other business engraved on its surface.

But they know the secret to marketing, and that is you want to get your message in front of as many eyes as you can. This becomes easy with engraving your message on everyday items we all use.

The one obvious problem with the ceramic coffee mug is that since it is made of ceramic, it can be fragile and susceptible to chipping, especially after being heated in a microwave or dishwasher. A good quality ceramic coffee mug is fired and finished and will not easily break, but when exposed to extreme heat or cold will become less resistant to breaking. Another drawback to the ceramic coffee mug is that it is not portable for travel.

When drinking coffee on the go, people will usually choose to drink their coffee or tea out of a plastic container with a sealed lid or a disposable cup from a coffee shop, but you can get very nice travel bugs from a variety of sources. They're not ceramic, but they're portable, have lids, and can be stylish as well as functional.