Your Stress-Free Wedding Stationery Guide: Timeline & Tips
Our wedding stationery order process will guide you step by step from organising, ordering, and distributing your wedding stationery. We offer it all from save-the-date cards, to menu cards, thank-you cards, and more.
We will support you through the process from start to finish to make your wedding arrangements as hassle-free as possible.
Choosing your theme
Having chosen your wedding theme and colours, peruse our wedding stationery selection to find something suitable for your memorable event.
For the best experience, it's recommended to use a unified design style across all stationary items, such as save the dates and invitations with similar font and colour, yet uniquely distinct imagery. Alternatively, we have a bespoke service to create something specifically for you.
Save the date cards
First of all, we recommend sending save-the-date cards roughly 6-8 months prior to the wedding, this gives plenty of time for your guests to make their arrangements, just remember people have holidays, work or even need to arrange babysitters in advance. They may even need to book travel and accommodation.
6 Months atleast offers an ideal timeframe to allow for this.
To view our save the date cards, click here.
Wedding Day Invitations
Begin planning your wedding invitations and provide your guests with all the information they require to attend your special day!
Before you send out the invites you would have needed to have the venue & catering all arranged prior, as you would need to include this info in your invite.
It may sound obvious and silly to even mention this but it’s really easy to overlook things when you are organising a wedding.
You want your guests to know where to be, when to be there, and the menu selections.
Ideally, you would want to send these out around 3 months before the day, but make sure you get the R.S.V.P back promptly so you can then focus on table planners, etc.
To view our wedding invitations, click here.
Wedding Invite Inserts
If you opt for wedding invite inserts, we have 2 that can be included.
- R.S.V.P Inserts
R.S.V.P. cards are an efficient way to acquire details from participants, typically limited to answering whether they will attend as well as any food or dietary preferences.
- Finer Details Inserts
Essential details, such as the order of proceedings, directions, and venue info, are featured on these cards.
Gift information, or any other requests, such as adult-only attendance, may also be included.
As we mentioned before ideally, you would need to have these back with sufficient time (ideally 4-6 weeks before) to arrange your table plans and inform the venue and caterers.
Evening Invitations
These invites are only for the reception after the ceremony and wedding breakfast have ended and it’s time to party. Of course, these are only needed if you have separate guests coming for the evening only. If you have sent a normal wedding invite out that implies they are already invited to the reception, so need to double up here.
Send 1 card per household and use the names of whoever is invited, or if there is only one person in that household you may want to say (name of guest) + 1. For example, if they want to bring a date or a close friend along then they can if you give them that option.
You should send these out at a similar time to your main invites. Potentially afterwards as you might have guests that cannot attend and you might want to change them from an evening guest to a full-day guest.
To view our evening guest invitations, click here.
On-the-day wedding stationery
So the big day is drawing nearer, but just because the invites have all been answered the work doesn’t stop there, now it’s time to put those names to paper again with place cards, service booklets and table planners, etc.
All stationery needed for the day often gets overlooked until very late on but it’s important to remember these as you don’t want to be scrambling at the last minute to arrange them and bolt on unneeded stress. The sooner you get back the R.S.V.P’s the sooner you can get started. We would usually recommend ordering your on-the-day stationery 4-6 weeks before the wedding day, don’t leave it any later because you will have a fair few things to check over before the final submission, headcount, table placement, confirming the meal allocation to the caterers and any wedding favors you need to arrange.
We will double-check and quality-check everything with you before the final printouts are made. This will also give you a final chance to make any last amendments.
- Order of service
An ideal way to keep your guests updated on the day, as they are not likely going to remember all of the details you sent in the R.S.V.P’s those few months ago and you don’t want to leave your guests wandering around and then needing to run around herding them like sheep when you are on a schedule to fit photos in before the meal etc.
To view our order of service cards, click here.
- Table planners & place cards
Guests will quickly spot a visually-appealing seating arrangement that shows them where and who they are seated with, allowing them to make their own way to their seats without wasting time searching each table. This setup also helps the catering staff's coordination when serving meals.
To view our table planners, click here.
To view our place cards, click here.
- Menu Cards
You may consider having menu cards on your guest's seats so they and the caterers know who is having what and where. The information on this card is plain and simple, just the guest's name, their meal choices, and if they may have any dietary needs.
Again for all of the on-the-day stationery, we would recommend keeping the design similar to the invites and save the dates to continue with the theme alignment, but remember it’s your wedding so the choice is yours!
To view our menu cards, click here.
Top Tip
We strongly advise creating a spreadsheet to help you easily keep track of planning. We can construct one for you if you provide us with a list of names and meal preferences. Assembling a draft table planner can further simplify the final stages, you will feel less stressed and more organised.