Top 5 tips on how to choose your wedding stationery
Although necessary, wedding stationery can often be just another stress in our lives, because of this Capital of London has gone through and come up with a list of the most important things to consider:
1. What impression do you want to give your guests?
The invitations (or save the date cards) will be the first impressions your guests receive of your special day. They will give your guests an insight into your personality, taste and plans for the day (e.g. whether it will be a formal or informal day of celebration) So think about what impression you want to create; what the theme and colours of your day are and try to tie these things in to your wedding stationery.
2. What is your budget?
It’s so easy to get carried away so before you start looking, set yourself a budget and try to stick to it. If the stationery for the wedding is outside your budget, don’t be afraid to tell the printer how much you have to spend, often if we know what we need to work in we can make recommendations on different papers or printing styles to reduce the cost and if that is not possible some companies will be willing to drop their prices marginally to bring their designs within your price range.
3. What items do you need?
Wedding Invites: These a
re absolutely essential, unless you don’t want anyone to come to your wedding.
Wedding Evening Invites: These are for guests who are only invited to the reception. These are not always essential so should be looked at on a case by case basis.
Wedding registry cards: – These cards are gaining in popularity, but at the moment they are still not essential. Basically these cards are included to tell your guests where you are registered, I would organize the essential stationery first and if there is any money left over in the budget I would then look into what else I wanted.
Order of service: – These cards are very important, They will give your guests a breakdown of the service so they know what they are doing.
Wedding announcements: These cards will depend on when and where you’re wedding is. If you are having a destination wedding or if you have friends or relatives coming in from a long way off, these can be really hand as you can send them off up to a year in advance.
Save the date: The save the date cards are very similar to the wedding announcements above. You would only ever need to use a wedding announcement or a save the date not both.
Menus: These are not essential but can be a really nice addition, if you are stuck on your budget consider getting one menu per table
Place Cards: Not essential but can make a huge impression, generally very cheap, and provided you have neat handwriting are easy to fill out. If, like me, you’re handwriting is appalling you will need to look into getting a calligrapher to write out your place cards.
Thank you cards: These need to be sent out as soon as possible after the wedding. Even though it can be a pain all of these have to be handwritten with a personal message thanking the guest personally for the gift they have given you.
Reply Cards: Unfortunately these are essential, without them no one will reply, even with them you will always get a few who don’t reply.
4. How will you print your stationery?
Traditionally all wedding stationery should be engraved printed, but it is not always convenient to do this. A lot of your printing style will depend on your budget, but at the very least if possible I would try and make sure that your main invitations are engraved printed.
5. Order extra envelopes
This is something that always happens, as a general rule we will always included extra envelopes but just to be sure order some extra anyway, because as you are writing addresses some will get ruined. It happened to us a little while ago, a client (who had chosen to ignore our advise of ordering extra envelopes) called me up in a real panic, telling me that she had run out of envelopes and she needed to get her invitations in the post today. Unfortunately for her she had chosen a very detailed handmade envelope and there was no possible way for us to re-make new envelops in time. In this instance we were able to save the client as we had made extra envelopes the first time round, but I can’t promise that will always be the case so please be safe rather than sorry.
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I think the menu idea is essential the food plays a big part of the day so it’s important people know what they are getting. But not only that it provides a great keepsake of the day. An even better keepsake if it matches your other stationery.