Wedding Invitations

Your wedding invitations, in a way, reflect you and your partner’s personality. You will be sending the invitations to your closest friends and family, so they should convey what you are both about.

If you don’t put any thought into your wedding invitations, they wont represent you as well as they could. But if you put the effort in, your true message will come across and make the invitations that bit more unique and that bit more special.

You shouldn’t forget that your wedding invitations also inform your guests when and where the wedding will be taking place – so they have a very important role to play. Remember – without wedding invitations there wouldn’t be any guests!

And to help you sort your wedding invitations with as little fuss as possible, we want to get an opinion from as many experts as possible. So this time round, we spoke to Clare Greaves – she runs Blissful Designs and has been making all sorts of fancy wedding stationery and other creations for the past 4 years now.

So Clare, we always like to talk money first – in terms of wedding invitations, on average how much per head do people normally spend?

Couples usually spend around £2.50 per person with us on wedding invitations. This varies if they are getting other bits of stationery made with us.

How long does it normally take from the point of order to get the wedding invitations made and sent to the customer?

A standard order takes 20 working days from accepting the proof stationery. This is full printing and hand making each card.

So how long in advance would you normally say people should send their wedding invitations out?

At least 3 months but it can vary, depending on the date of your wedding. If you are getting married in the middle of summer, when your guests may have holidays booked etc it is always advisable to give as much notice as possible.
To resolve this, we find that our Save The Date cards are quite popular for notifying guests of the wedding date before sending the official wedding invitations out. Some of our customers have sent these out up to a year in advance.

Is it a good idea to have a reserve list, so you can invite more people if you’re low on numbers?

Almost definitely, the last thing the bride wants on her big day is to walk down the aisle past empty seats.

Have you ever had any unusual requests?

We get quite a lot of unique requests for wedding invitations, since all couples have their own taste. We have also had unusual requests based around football teams or football players – not very romantic, but very personal to the couple at least!

In your eyes, what makes a good wedding stationer and what makes a bad one?

A good stationer is able to adapt to the exact requirements of the bride and groom and have excellent design skills. Wedding invitations are very important and couples’ tastes vary, so stationers need to be able to offer an extensive range of designs to choose from.

Finally, do you have any particular advice for a bride-to-be when they’re starting to look at wedding invitations?

If brides are struggling to decide on their stationery, normally the best and easiest way to choose stationery is to stick with the colour of the brides dress or the bridesmaid dress and then simply choose a design that falls within their budget.

To find out more about wedding invitations and other stationery from Blissful Designs go to www.blissfuldesigns.co.uk