Wedding Stationery

For couples marrying in November & December, time is running short for ordering your wedding invitations.

Based on a fairly comprehensive invitation, involving embossing or foiling plates being made, 8-10 working weeks is required to comfortably plan, print & deliver your invitations; a more simple, printed invitation would be produced much more quickly. So to work out the latest date for ordering, follow the timeline here.

Assuming that your wedding is being held locally & that most of your guests reside in New Zealand, work backwards from your RSVP date. This will vary depending on your caterer or venue, but is generally 3-4 weeks before your wedding.

However much you trust your guests to respond on time, I guarantee that you will be phoning & emailing a few at the last minute, so an extra week in hand is always good to have.

Allow your guests 4-6 weeks to respond.

Having your invitations personalized will help hugely in saving you time & if you can have the envelopes pre-printed also, then that is a further time bonus. It is a very small additional cost for both of these services, but you save heaps in time & the overall look of your invitations is really smart. All you need to do is fill in a spreadsheet template with your guests names & addresses & “hey presto” it’s done!

Printing usually takes 2 working weeks.

Design, typesetting, & proofing processes vary depending on the invitation you have chosen, but to-ing & fro-ing of emails takes more time than you think &, as life tends to get in the way of most things, can stretch into weeks before you know it. Remember that yours are not the only invitations in production, so you just have to join the queue. If you answer emails as promptly as possible & try to keep changes to a minimum you should stay on track; each time the printers have to re-visit your file to make minor changes adds to the overall production time. The more you can plan up front the better.

So to summarize:

Wedding date - minus 4 weeks to RSVP date - minus 6 weeks to reply - minus 1 week for posting - minus 2 weeks for printing - minus  6 weeks for design, typesetting & proofing – minus 1 week to make a decision = 20 weeks.

So if you want custom made invitations & haven’t got this process started yet, you’d better get your skates on!
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Things to consider when selecting your wedding invitations: