Announcements

Wedding announcements are one of those things that are under appreciated until you have to do it yourself. I've gotten dozens of announcements, casually glanced them over, and thought "oh, what a cute couple." Now that Cheryl and I have had to create, assemble, stuff, and mail out 350 of them, I have really begun to appreciate what a chore it is. When looking for announcements, it was hard to find ones that we really liked. We found one invitation that we really liked, but calculated that each card cost $12 each. Unbelievable.

Although, at $12/invitation, there must be some really good margins available. I think that makes for a great business opportunity: on-line custom designed cards (think www.dell.com), that are then sourced off-shored and shipped to the customer. Huge margins for the unmet need of quality, personalized, and affordable announcements and invitations.

Anyway, we finally went to a friend, Michelle DeMartini, to have our invitations custom designed. She did an amazing job. Here is her design. The middle black section is the place holder for this picture, which another friend, Diana Hatch, took for us.

The printer, however, was troublesome. Due to an ordering snafu, when we went to pick them up the first time we were told they wouldn't be ready for another 5 days. When we went to pick them up the second time we were told that the order had been confused and that the envelopes weren't printed. We finally got our invitations on our third attempt. Cheryl and I then spent hours gluing 700 photo corners onto the invitations, printing out the envelopes, stuffing them, stamping them and mailing them. I don't know how people managed this process prior to computers.

Luckily though, the invitations are out, and I love the way things turned out. From now on, when I get a wedding announcement, I'll make sure to spend some more time appreciating the effort and time taken to send me one and be more grateful that this person was willing to put in so much effort to keep me included in their special day.