The Man Who Trained Four Generations of the Department
Mr. Bannerjee retired last month after thirty-one years at the company — long enough that he had trained the person who trained the person who eventually trained me. Nobody currently on the floor had ever worked in a department he hadn't shaped in some way, even people who'd never met him directly, because the systems he'd built were still the systems everyone used.
The retirement committee's standard process kicked in automatically: a farewell lunch, a card circulated for signatures, a small clock or memento from the approved vendor list. All of it perfectly appropriate for a colleague of two or three years. All of it wildly insufficient for thirty-one.
What Thirty-One Years Actually Means
I sat with a few colleagues trying to articulate what made this different from an ordinary farewell, and we kept arriving at the same conclusion: Mr. Bannerjee wasn't just leaving a role. He was the last living link to an entire era of the company that most of us only knew through stories — the original building before the move, the founder who'd since passed away, decisions and crises that shaped everything we now took for granted as "how things are done here."
A signed card, however warm the messages, compresses that into the same format as a two-year employee's farewell. It flattens thirty-one years into fifteen rushed sentences written in the same ten minutes everyone else's card gets.
What We Actually Built
We went with the Babushona Frame — deliberately the premium piece in Redox Art's catalogue, because this was exactly the kind of moment that premium framing was reserved for. Crafted from Indian Gamcha fabric, which carries its own cultural weight, its own sense of permanence and heritage — fitting for someone whose thirty-one years had become part of the company's own heritage.
We had it illustrated from an old photograph one of the founders' family members still had — Mr. Bannerjee in his first year, decades younger, standing outside the company's original building, which no longer exists.
Alongside it, we built a COUNTS Memory Magazine — and this became a genuine department-wide project. We reached out to over twenty current and former colleagues, some who'd left the company years earlier, asking for one specific memory each. Not "congratulations on retirement" — an actual story. The crisis he'd talked someone through at 11 PM. The system he'd insisted on building properly instead of quickly, which had saved the department countless hours for two decades since. The particular, very specific way he always asked "did you eat lunch yet?" before any serious conversation, which somehow made even difficult feedback feel like it came from someone who cared.
Redox Art compiled it into a genuine document — thirty-plus pages, spanning contributors across three decades of the company's history, something that read like an actual archive rather than a hastily assembled tribute.
The Room When He Opened It
We gave both pieces at the farewell lunch, after the standard card and clock had already been handed over. He opened the frame first, and recognised the old building immediately — he hadn't seen a photograph of it in years, he said, most of them had been lost in an office move sometime in the 2000s.
Then he opened the magazine, and the room, which had been full of the usual farewell-lunch chatter, went quiet as he started reading pages aloud, unprompted — a memory from someone who'd left the company a decade earlier, a story from his very first week that none of the current team had ever heard.
He didn't finish reading it at the lunch. He told us later he'd read the whole thing that night, and again a few days later, and had already decided where in his house it was going to live.
What a Retirement Gift Should Actually Carry
A retirement, more than almost any other workplace farewell, deserves to be treated as what it is: the closing of an era, not just a role vacancy. A card and a standard-issue memento treat thirty-one years exactly the same as three. The right gift does the opposite — it makes the scale of the time visible, physically, in a way a card never can.
The Babushona Frame carries that weight through its craftsmanship and material, appropriate for a moment that genuinely warrants premium treatment. The Memory Magazine carries it through scale — decades of people, decades of stories, compiled into something that becomes an actual record rather than a fleeting gesture.
Mr. Bannerjee's frame now sits in his study. The magazine, his daughter told one of our colleagues later, made it into his retirement speech at a family gathering the following weekend. He'd read from it directly.
Give a retiring colleague's decades the acknowledgment they earned. Browse Redox Art bestsellers — bulk team contributions welcome for memory magazines.