About Us

It started with a checklist.

We're Stew and Beth. We run Portal TCG, our Plymouth trading-card business — and Portal Customs is the part we're proudest of.

Beth has always loved books: beautiful editions, special covers, the kind you display rather than hide away. She trained in photography and fine art, and she kept looking at her Pokémon collection thinking it deserved the same treatment — not just stored, but presented. Like a special edition. Something worth keeping on a shelf.

So she started designing master-set checklists — a proper, considered way to track and complete a set. Collectors loved them. They hit page one on Etsy. And the more people asked, the clearer it became: the checklist was only the beginning. People didn't just want to track their sets — they wanted custom binders to match. Spines that line up like books on a shelf. A whole collection that looks as good as the cards inside it.

That's Portal Customs.

Why we really started.

There's a more personal reason behind all of this. After a serious accident, Beth was left with CRPS — Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, a chronic pain condition that means everyday life has to flex around appointments, surgery and recovery. We built our business so it could be built around her: something we own, that works on our terms, made from home at our own pace. Portal Customs grew out of that — Beth's art, and a hard few years, turned into something we genuinely love making.

Every design is drawn by hand. No AI. No templates. No copies.

Everything we make is original artwork by Beth — designed for a specific set, printed in full colour, and made to order in the UK. We don't pull designs from a generator or trace someone else's work. Every binder, every checklist, every spine is drawn from scratch — because your collection deserves better than something a machine made in ten seconds.

Built by collectors, for collectors.

Stew's been collecting since he was nine — first Base Set pack pulled on a childhood trip to the US, hooked ever since. Beth turned a lifelong love of art and design into the look of the whole brand. Between us, we make the things we always wished we could buy: premium, set-specific, and genuinely made with care.

We're a small team in Plymouth, printing and packing every order ourselves. Order from Portal Customs and you're not buying from a faceless brand — you're buying from two people who put themselves into every set.

Welcome to the family.
— Stew & Beth, Portal Customs