How many invitations you need to order for your wedding?
After many years working as a professional stationery designer, there’s one mistake I keep seeing a lot of people making at the moment they’re deciding how many invitations they actually need to order.
To my clients, no worries because I am here to help, but also I think it is important to share this information with everyone as well because this issue can make you whether waste a lot of money or make you run short on invitations.
So these are my recommendations when ordering your invitations.
Get your guests list done soon.
And by soon I mean to make it your number one priority.
You might probably have a rough idea on how many people you want to invite to your wedding, but this is not enough when it comes to making final decisions with your vendors including the invitations, among others. You need a final count as soon as possible and don’t sleep on it because ordering your stationery is a time sensitive issue, especially if you want to develop a custom design, need to mail invitations internationally or have a destination wedding.
To make things easier for you, grab my free guest list template here!
2. The most important tip: count invitations per household and not per guest!
If I tell you couples sometimes end up ordering two times the invitations they actually need, I’m not even lying. This is definitely the most common mistake when getting the number of invitations needed.
Just as a reference, for a 200 guests wedding the usual count of invitations goes between 100-120, and that’s considering keeping some extras, just in case.
Remember that most guests won’t attend alone, and even if so, they’re usually not a large majority.
Also, and related to this topic, there are some rules of etiquette for wedding invitations that need to be considered to have a final count for stationery. For example, every person older than 18 years old, even when living in the same household as the parents, need their own invitation separately. So in cases like this one, you will have to mail more than one invitation to the same family living under the same roof.
3. Always order extra invitations
So once you have your final guest count, add a little more "blank" invitations to the list. It’s always a good idea to have additional invitations in case of last minute additions, or if you need to mail some again because they got lost or damaged in transit.
Also, remember that you need to consider 1 or 2 sets for your photographer, as well as extras as family keepsakes.
10-15 extra invitations is always a good number.
4. Talking about extras, order a few additional envelopes.
…especially if you’re hiring a calligrapher to to do the addressing.
As a calligrapher myself, I always ask for 15-20% extra envelopes because I am a human so obviously I make mistakes all the time. But also machines make mistakes too, so even if you’re printing the addresses yourself, things can go wrong and you need to be covered in those situations.
If you are working with a full-service stationery designer (as myself) you won’t probably need to worry about ordering extra envelopes because you won’t need to do anything to your stationery yourself, but if you plan to order from an online printing service, please consider this.
If you need more help with your invitations, I’m here to help. Let’s get in touch and create together the invitations of your dreams!
