Weddingbee Blog

Too dramatic? OK let’s try again.

We’re not sending invitations.

We’ve been thinking along these lines for a while. But I haven’t really discussed it with anyone fully besides Mr. Veggie. I guess I was a bit afraid of peoples’ reactions.

Will they be shocked at our lack of decorum?

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Confused at why we would forgo such an important detail?

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Disapproving of our decision?

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Well, Willis, this is what we’re talking about. Tough choices.

We have a strict budget, financially and ecologically. When we decided to splurge on a photographer we knew there would be other things that we would have to cut out. And, when we looked at all of the components of a wedding, invites just seemed to make the most sense to us, ecologically and financially.

Don’t get me wrong. I love getting mail. I love the idea of people opening our invites all over the world and getting excited for our big day. I would love getting back RSVP cards. I love envelope liners. I love twine. I love wood block carvings. I love letterpress.

I love this set of invites:

And this one:

And this one:

And this one:

While I swooned over our Save The Dates design, I didn’t like that they arrived in the form of an attachment on an email. Where’s the fun in that? No one gets excited over receiving a mass email. Verdana font on a computer screen just can’t compete with letterpress swirls and twirls. And the second it takes you to click on an attachment hardly holds the anticipation and glee of opening an envelope.

And that’s why my heart broke a little the day I realized that paper invitations were not in our future.

But then I found Paperless Post and the skies began to clear. They have solved the excitement v. eco, pretty v. functional, paper v. e- dilemmas. When you send an invitation through them they send a personalized envelope to each recipient’s email, which they can click on to “open” the invitation. The invitation they open is created by you using one of PP’s gorgeous templates, which are designed to look like letterpress. They can click on the invitation to RSVP. Genius.

And then I saw this video… and I swear I heard a choir of angels.

I began to realize that there are some advantages that e-invites have over their paper counterparts. Not only could we do a rad video, but depending on what company we use, we can also link directly to our website and registry, manage our RSVPs, link to a Mapquest or Google map, and even allow people to add our wedding as an event to their blackberries.

So what I’m imagining now is a Paperless Post-type e-invite where the email guests receive will have a personalized envelope. But instead of opening up to a beautiful one-page invite, it will open to a multiple page invite. The first page will contain our video, the second will look like a traditional invite, and the third will link to our wedding website where guests can RSVP, check out maps, registries, etc.

OK bees, so here’s my question to you. How do I make this happen? Paperless Post says that their system is only set up to do one-page invites. Any ideas?