A BUSINESSWOMAN is creating unique jewellery from the fingerprints of customers’ loved ones, the handprints of their babies and even the pawprints of their pets.

Sara Thomas had a 30-year career in retail, buying for Beales and Haskins, before setting up on her own.

She bought the local franchise for Smallprint, which turns fingerprints, hand and footprints and signatures into sterling silver jewellery.

Some of the pieces feature fingerprints pressed directly onto silver, so the customer will always have a keepsake touched by their loved one.

Other products preserve babies’ and children’s hand or footprints in miniature, after they are collected them on special sensitive paper.

Bransgore-based Sara said the products were a powerful way for people to keep a reminder of their loved ones close to them.

“It’s so much about the emotion that goes with it,” she said.

As well as Smallprint East Dorset, she took on Memory Treasures East Dorset, which allows people to keep a print from someone who has died. The jewellery can be made from an existing print or taken from the body at the funeral home.

Sara takes the prints from deceased loved one herself. “I go in and talk to that person and say what I’m there for as I do it – because it’s respectful. They’re still a person, somebody’s mother or father,” she said.

She has just bought the franchise for Silver Pet Prints East Dorset, which makes jewellery out of pets’ pawprints.

The jewellery she produces includes charms, pendants, bracelets, keyrings and cufflinks. Prices range from £50 for a charm to cuff link starting at £95.

Sara said the business used the business, creative and people skills she developed in her retail career.

“I did quite an intensive training course to do it and then it’s practise, practise, practise. When you’re talking about hand engraving, it’s quite a challenge,” she said.

The Smallprint fingerprint jewellery business was started in 2004 and is now in 22 countries.