Regardless of your need or desire to cancel an nivitation order, most suppliers of invitations have little control over an invitation order once it has gone to press. The detailed work and order specifications required to get a wedding invitation order into production are numerous, and the hours required far more than the 1.5 hour average consultation time required in person alone to get the job done. Therefore, most suppliers will NOT be able to pull an order out of production without paying in full for the order. The fact that you no longer want or need the order makes for a very sad dilemma for both you and your service provider. No supplier wants an unhappy bride who wishes to cancel and get a refund. However, just like a payment on a reception site or photographer is lost, so it is with invitations. NOT every situation is black and white in terms of feasibility. It will have to be worked out with your supplier. Most suppliers will do all they can to accommodate you. Perhaps, you decided you wish to select another design. Perhaps, your wedding was cancelled. Whatever the reason, your supplier will work with you. Please read your sales contract carefully for your responsbilities. This custom printed item is NOT a returnable or resaleable item. Take your time when making a purchase. It is well worth it. Because we have a proof time involved after purchase, we usually have enough time to allow a bride to make an alternate selection, and simply pay for a new set of proofs. If you have any questions about contact me. judy@lilleyprinting.com
Do your best to begin the process early to “set a realistic budget” for wedding invitations. Some brides base the amount they wish to spend on much lesser wedding invitations’ costs in bridal mail order magazines. These often are printed on papers they do NOT select in the same style of design as shown in major wedding invitation albums. The difference in cost then becomes a disappointment to them when they actually sit down and select something of greater value or design, and the adjustment in price is not within their original plans. Either, it is a discussion with the other parties involved in helping finance the wedding or in a sense of loss in not purchasing the invitation the bride wants most. Deciding how important this one item is to you is critical to the amount of money you wish to commit to making this purchase. Viewing invitations that will match the theme of your wedding, style, and budget is an important item to begin early so that you can make the decision that pleases you asethetically, as well as your wedding budget. Most fine stationers will offer you selections that match your specifications in a variety of albums. Custom invitations generally cost a little more because a unique invitation is being created for you. Or, it is one of the designs of the supplier and it is NOT being mass produced like wedding album invitaiton designs. judy@lilleyprinting.com
One of the things some brides find it hardest to do is to decide what to do about the printed invitations needed for their weddings. Buying printed items is a usually a new experience for most brides, and, even those of us in the business can be overwhelmed by the variety of both designs, fonts, printing methods, and papers available not to mention that invitations can be either very formal, or informal, modern or traditional. When I order printing for myself, I confess that it takes me time to decide what I want as well. To make the process easier on yourself, we suggest that you begin early. View peripherally those designs you see in magazines and those you receive. Mail order magazines are usually dedicated to lower cost invitations and most of them are at least thermographied or raised letter printing, but NOT engraved. These invitations are usually usually moderately priced and you will find the same selections in general albums often offered by formal wear houses,caterers, etc. as add on purhchases to the main purchase of tuxedos, bridal gown, catering and wedding cakes.. While anyone with experience can faciliate an order, details to the printing industry can more thoroughly be covered in terms of custom liners, calligraphy addressing, artwork for maps and direction cards, and other information you need included with your order. Take time to acquaint yourself with what you need to know before you make your selection. If we can be of service to you, let us know. judy@lilleyprinting.com
Unique Wedding Invitations:
Seem to be the desire of every bride in today’s wedding stationery selection. Finding a design that you can implement and make your own in wedding albums is very possible with the assistance and support of the right design and support staff at your stationery printers. There are many ways you can save money in your bridal and wedding budget with the right help and knowledge which this site is designed to help you do. We work to offer brides a large number of fine resources for invitations for a smaller wedding to a very large one. The wedding information you will need for wise stationery purchases can be gathered rather easily here. We suggest www.verseit.com for discerning your initial wording for invitations. judy@lilleyprinting.com
Wedding Invites
sometimes end up near the last of the “to - do’s” for many brides because they are nervous about what is required to get the task completed.
This blog is designed to assist you with the information here and on our site as a guide to what you need to be aware of when making decisions about your wedding invitations.
More information is also included in our shop on line section of this website with Encore Studios’ wedding invitation guideliens as well.
We encourage you to review these designs for they offer a broad range of pricing with fine designs for a many types of budgets.
What caused us to wish to blog was to let you know that we understand the dilemma of selection, colors, style, fonts, information, and the host of information you need to know and gather in order to make your purchase.
We hope to provide you with several pieces of vital information contained in our new eBook, and CD that will give you a method and a means of organizing everything from guest lists to address lists to style, papers, colors, fonts, and more for your wedding stationery needs.
We are available by personal email to answer your questions. Judy Lilley, judy@lilleyprinting.com
Fall wedding invitations that blend with the colors in a fall wedding can be reflected in papers that are traditional with colorful liners in envelopes or can be stretched into a wonderful palette of brick reds, red-reds, golds, burnt oranges, sage greens, olive greens, and more with the use of various ink colors, paper colors, and more in everything from traditional wedding invitations and fonts to contemporary designs and papers and fonts. You can personalize your wedding as much as you want with the right amount of detail in your wedding stationery planning, and the right helps to go with this. The presentation of your wedding invitations are important and because they are printed matter, require time and attention to detail to get what you most want for your stationery expenditures. Proper planning covers getting the most for your stationery printing dollar as well as informing, inviting and getting guests to your event easily, and make responding easy. Have fun with this, and begin NOW so you have what you need when you need it. Judy Laughton Lilley
Destination weddings require more planning because your guests are going to need to make travel arrangements. Other than the fact that they need to be purchased and mailed out earlier, nothing changes really. Most often, the ceremony and reception are in the same location, a response card is needed, sometimes, a menu selection is also needed, and more often than not, a map is drawn or directions provided from the airport to the hotel where the event is occurring, and possibly one other hotel is located on the map or directions/hotel accommodations to make it more affordable for some of your guests. We have a number of invitations that will work with themes, or we can introduce motifs to the designed pieces from our albums to more definitively personalize your customized album designs. Write or call me today to see how we may meet your needs. judy@lilleyprinting.com, 314-752-7092
We work by appointments to provide one on one attention to your needs. Plan to have a brief initial consultation of 30 to 45 minutes initially to see if we are the right fit for you. You will partially ascertain this from our first phone chat and followup email to you. If one of us does NOT answer the phone, we are either on another line or serving another client. We will phone you back as close as possible to your request(s). Please leave us more than one time frame with which to contact you. Or, leave a message AND send me an email. We do our best to accommodate your needs ASAP. We want to provide your invitations and your needs the same exclusive attention to detail as those persons we happen to be with if we don’t answer personally, so please forgive us and give us an oppty to focus solely on you. At your first appointment, please bring along some initial written information, like the names of parents, addresses of the church, and reception hall or banquet facilities, and any other pertinent information you have ready. If you want to draw your own map, our suppliers will use your art for a small fee so that you do NOT need to incur more costs except for what the brokered printers of these designs require. For more information, please write judy@lilleyprinting.com, or phone us at 314-752-7092
Shopping online for wedding invitations can provide you, the bride, with a number of ideas, fonts, colors, and designs for sending the message you wish to your family and friends. See our special section on this site: www.lilleyprinting.invitations.com for beautiful invitations from our Encore Studios lines. This provider also offers computer calligraphy addressing at a reasonable price either in black ink or in the color of ink that matches your wedding invitations and map/direction insert cards. Take a peek at our shop online section of our site, and be prepared to enjoy reviewing invitations long before you shop for them. You may also enjoy our newsletters and other helpful hints. If you would like to know more about these invitations, please email me at judy@lilleyprinting.com. We are here to serve you. Sincerely, Judy Lilley, 314-752-7092
In order to preserve the look of tradition, and incorporate art, fine letterpress wedding invitations offer brides the best of the old world, and the new. We are able to use the finest of archival papers, make the deepest impression or rivulets of ink, into the fine Euro papers we use for our printing. Wedding note cards imprinted with your names, and preseving the “dies” used for your printing as mementos of your invitation purchase and printing experience are part of hte expression of your personal style and taste in font, design, and motfis in one color, two color or three color letterpress printing. This is one of the loveliest of printing forms we have available to you from our 82 years of experience. Write to JayLiL for questions about your letterpress needs for your wedding. Direct the mail to JayLiL c/o email: lilleyprinting@sbcglobal.net Thank you for the opportunity to share what we think about our fine invitations. Purchases of samples are available, and their purchase is credited to a full wedding invitation and response card order.
Recently, we listed our beautiful table cards and numbers along with some of our designs on ebay to test the marketplace, and much to our surprise, these ‘color’ theme matching to the wedding items took off.
This shimmering, metallic like stock comes in over 30 plus colors and combinations. We hope that brides check out our site to view these beautiful cards that we often match to place cards and more.
Guests will find their way to your table easily with these beautiful cards we create.
Judy Lilley,
Who would have thought that planning what to say on paper, and to whom one would be sending invitations, reception cards, response cards, and wedding map/reception cards would be such a large task.
Yet, it is! This one choice sets the tone for your entire wedding….and gives guests their first glimpse of the wedding that is to come.
Questiions come up in one’s mind as to how one is going to present oneself in print…and how to actually tie color, design, and many other concerns into one neat package.
When putting together a concept of your own, it is best to get experts to help you pull it off, even if you wish to DIY when it comes to assembly. In this way, you know that your pieces and ensemble will look professionally done, not home made.
We do our best to make it easy for you to get the pieces of this together, quickly, and promptly, and easily…..with proper planning from paper choices, design, size, style, wording, printing, and even getting them addressed….
Planning with us for your wedding day makes it all much easier to reach your dreams.
Judy Laughton Lilley
What’s Bright and New and Up and Coming is some lovely vibrant color combinations:
aqua and brown
cornflower blue and brown
white and indigo blue (or denim)
black and white (with small touches or red or pink)
brown and orange (cocoa and peach)
Look for more about up and coming color, and popular themes for spring and summer weddings in our newsletter soon to be published online.
Email me anytime with your questions about invitations, calligraphy, programs, or accessories
Judy Lilley
Planning stationery for one’s wedding is not the easiest task on your list of things to do. That is why we have done our best to make it simpler for you with our website. We encourage you to dream big with this task….as in thinking of what you are planning in terms of the whole event. Recently, I wrote a blog for bridesclub.com re: the construction of your invitations. And, I have shown many brides how we can take a larger amount of stock, and plan to build an entire ensemble from the same materials….all the pieces match, the invitations, the thank you notes, the wedding maps, the programs, the seating cards…all of it….So, think about what you would like to build, and begin your planning with a meeting with us. Judy Laughton Lilley
Last Friday, when I picked up the Post Dispatch to read it, and found the article on weddings, and the high use of bridal consultants, I also found interesting content re: wedding stationery. Since 2003, when the average price per person spent by the bride using a consultant ran $7 per person, the Post quoted a local consultant’s average pricing for total stationery per guest at $15 to $25 per person.
You might be thinking…well what are your thoughts on this. And, here they are. Most wedding invitation packages run with a quantity of about 150 to 175 invitations, and we advise on having a wedding map to help out of the area guests as well as some locals find their way. In addition, most brides want a wedding program, and, seating cards, and even table cards. So, it is easy for the total package with a higher quantity, some personalization, or customization, to run much higher than the national average of around $800.00.
Today, brides are picking up copies of Martha Stewart weddings, and other bridal magazines, and want to achieve the same looks or their own version of what they are finding in wedding magazines, or Personalized Nuptials., even when we provide an invitation from an album.
Get enough information to set a realistic amount for invitations. Recently, I wrote a blog on what $200 would buy and $300 would buy so that brides would know what to expect when purchasing.
Judy Lilley
Most recently, we have worked with several brides whose wedding guests lists, once finished, put their quantity of invitations at the 200 range.
When a bride thinks she needs 150, and we price it as we have in a routine baseline invitation for around $550.00 for invitations, envelopes, reception cards, response cards and envelopes and thank you notes, she is most likely in a pretty comfortable zone. Add to this another 50 of each item, and you are looking at a minimum of $200.00 to $250.00 or the $700 to $750.00 range without tax and shipping or more likely $840 to $850.00. The cardstock is debossed with triple edgings around each piece, and the baseline is $86.00 for 100 invitations. If you add 200 maps/direction cards, double side printed, and you are adding another $200+ for the double sized printed card to match, 4.25 by 6. This brings the total closer to $1050.00. With this order, however, you will also receive the value added credit pleasure of services in the addressing of all your inner and outer envelopes absolutely free of charge, a value worth more than $470.00 if you placed this order with Carlson Craft. So before you get ready to order from a formal wear entity, take a look at the total package.
A lovely baseline invitation in a middle lower range and higher quality paper with more design is $200 per 100. The cost is in the math, and the quantity, just like it is with the caterer. It is a design that is still printed in the millions.
Thus an order for a custom piece of work (one of a kind) will most likely run about 20 to 50 per cent more in most instances. Why? Quite simply, we are talking about he cost of two things, “much higher quality paper stock”, and design time, and innovation or ribbons.
We don’t want to have the cost of custom invitations remain a mystery with us, but it all comes down to quantity, the paper stock, the amount of design time required with us, and the type of printing we are doing.
Judy Laughton Lilley, CEO
While invitations can be produced on RUSH ORDERS very quickly, it usually comes with several prices. One is cost. Two is stress. Three is the loss of options: Some suppliers will not rush any order for any reason or any price.
We did complete an order in January in under 4 weeks. In fact, it was a custom order, and it was completed in 3 weeks and one day. We printed it here.
Most of our better suppliers will get an order to us within two weeks of completion of proofs. Some much sooner as they are located within several hundred miles of us.
We suggest giving yourself time. Most brides need the time it takes to go over copy and text before we create formal proofs, and go to press.
Judy Laughton Lilley, CEO, Lilley Printing Co.
We posted a $500.00 gift certificate for brides who would send us permission to send them our newsletters and other specials and vital information on or before July 1st when we proceed with the drawing.
As of the close of the business day, we hoped to see many more brides take the opportunity to win this gift certificate for fine custom wedding invitations.
We look forward to creating a one of a kind wedding invitation of your choice and using our gift certificate toward this order.
Take a moment if you are on our site, and enter to win!
We look forward to congratulating the winner!
Mrs. L.
The following formula works:
add up the total number of guests including each single person’s guest and divide this by 2 to give a total.
Add a total of 25 extras for persons that each side of the family may have forgotten, and round it up by 25 as most suppliers insist on ordering in increments of 25.
Thus, if your total number of persons is 286, the quantity will be 143, add 25 to this, which comes to 168, rounded up, the quantity will then be 175 on the order.
While proofs are being made on your order, you may up your count on the signoff. We adjust the quantity on our supplier’s signoff forms, and then revise your purchase order.
So, we do our best to take as much angst out of discerning this number as possible so that the final count is NOT needed to begin the purchase process.
Mrs. Judy C. Lilley
The reason so many brides forget this item is that her parents guests to their own weddings 30 years ago most likely did not include many out of town guests.
We design this piece to look as much like the invitations as possible. On a custom design, it is a lay-up, we just make certain we order more stock, and make it all match, color of ink, font, etc.
For invitations from one of our dealer albums, we match their cardstock, and the font and ink color as closely as possible and in most instances, exactly. This is a little easier if we do the whole package as we customize the dealer design with our own typesetting ensuring that the package’s ensemble is cohesive. We can still do this in most instances because of the extensiveness of our font selection(s).
We take the opportunity to include your typewritten text and wrap it on the back of the map card drawn from your hand drawing. You don’t have to draw it to scale. We include landmarks, like the Arch, the airport, etc. or the stadium depending on the locations of hotels, etc. Our map is not drawn to scale as we keep the size to the standard 4.25 by 6 card. We also provide maps in 5 inch squares and larger, a tea length map to match the invitation or larger, legend size map to match the legend invitation…..a longer and wider card than a tea length design.
The thoughtfulness of including this one piece gives your guests help in finding their way to your ceremony and reception. It also ensures that not getting lost, you won’t have guests arriving late or frazzled to your ceremony.
Most brides put this off to the last minute. If you print a map on a piece of paper and insert it, make sure you fold it, as the copier powder will rub off on your invitations.
One added comment…..hotel accommodation information is usually put on the back of the map with the written directions.
Feel free to write or call us anytime regarding your stationery needs.