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Comment by apsurd | Hacker News Reader

People really use wedding invitations printed from their home printer? I would think no girl would stand for that =x

I probably don't know what the hell I'm talking about, but wouldn't it be a better play to integrate (somehow) with a printing company? Or offer an export option that they can take to a local printer (as in the correct file format .eps, pantone color numbers, or what not).

Sorry if I am completely ignorant to the wedding invitations scene but I would think every girl deserves nice invitations and the convenience of a one-stop-online-shop.

Hmm maybe crowdsourced invitation designs.. ala threadless.com ?

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Having been married a while ago, I'm pretty sure we had the invitations done at a local print shop.

Weddings are generally the ultimate in meet-your-hero-letdown. Everything is fussed about in minute detail, but then it's all over, and you're left thinking 'what was all that for'. The memories of the day and what comes after has zero to do with wedding stationery. I can't even remember what color ours was. I'd rather spend the money and fly in a distant relative or old friend than spend big money on invite printing. Your guests will appreciate and remember hours spent refining a speech over hours fussing about invites and place settings. There is definitely diminishing returns once you get over pre-printed and hand-written invites.

Getting back on-topic : I think you'll do well with this and the wedding industry is over-priced, but a lot of it has to do with ego-management. If I were a photographer or florist, I'd add 20% to the price to put up with all the 'it's got to be perfect' crap that goes with it. Self-serve printing removes all that, so is justified with a lower margin. As long as it looks nice, people will pay the money. You'll be able to pick the cheap paper without someone frowning down your nose saying 'if you really want it to be special...'

I'm getting married in a little over a month and my thoughts resonate a lot with your statement on not spending a lot on the cards. I'm designing the cards on my own (using Gimp, Lightroom and Sketchbook app on iPad - never done this before) and getting it printed locally. I don't think it's worth spending a ton of cash on fancy cards and pricey printing costs.

That's actually where I'd like the idea to go — partner with a printing company like Moo.com and allow for invite creation and printing all from one application. Got to start somewhere, though.

I didn't put in all my ideas (since I didn't want to do "this idea, and THIS idea, and THIS idea!") but I think a threadless-like crowdsourcing on invitations would be fantastic, and a great tie-in to a Moo.com like printing ability.

I was surprised how many people use kits — I used to be part of a wedding blog where people loved to build their invites and then show everyone else for critiques. And I would cringe everytime I saw someone using italic Times New Roman because they didn't have access to nicer fonts.

Sounds kind of like http://www.zazzle.com/invitations.

Thanks for linking that, haven't seen it before. I was thinking that this idea could move into general invitations as well but who does that anymore, with FB invites, evite, etc. I think actually sticking to a niche and doing it well will be better than doing general invitations.

You could also partner with stationary accessory makers (ribbon bows, glitter, small dried flowers, etc.) for further personalization of mass produced DIY kits.

I hadn't seen http://zazzle.com/wedding+invitations before either, so now I'm curious how weddingtype.com would be different. It'd be good to think about a couple places where you might be able to differentiate by focusing on this particular niche. E.g the ability to add extras to the card such as ribbon. Also, one thing I didn't like about Zazzle was that I can't order just 1 invitation. I'd be nervous about ordering 200 invitations I'd never seen in person and would want a sample first.

As a technical person who spent too much on wedding invitations at the last minute, I do think that integration with a printing company would be the killer feature.

Without the printing I would think of this as more of toy than something that would be truly disruptive. One could charge much larger prices for this service with printing and still be competitive especially when factoring in design selection and ease of use.

Definitely where I'd like to go, and I'll probably update my blog post to indicate this (took it out just to keep the idea concrete, but I think that was a bad idea). My original tagline was "Moo.com for wedding invitations".

As a technical person who spent too much on wedding invitations at the last minute, I do think that integration with a printing company would be the killer feature.

Moreover, I worry that launching without a printing service would be a business-killing misfeature. It sets the wrong tone (nobody wants to have their own invites printed) from which it may be hard to recover.

I recognise the founder's desire to handle this in small chunks, but printing... I dunno, I wouldn't look twice without it.

Picwing might be able to help on advice for this. Their photo quality is AMAZING. Anyone know how they did it?

I think paper selection is also half the battle. My wife could spend hours on that alone.

Yeah! That would actually be a better value add if the website integrated preferred paper types/styles/weights with the overall template/theme. Would be nice to have a gallery of previously fulfilled orders to see how the finished product came out. Lot's of choices means a great opportunity for artistic expression ; the website should allow this in a guided manner =) I like that.

agreed, what makes DIY wedding stationery look gross isn't just the comic-sans-like amateur designs; it's also about printing quality. a home printer is totally unacceptable; even Kinko's might not be that great if you're picky. you will need to find a professional print shop, which could cost almost as much as professionally-printed stationery :(

One thing I loved about the invitation kits is that they're not that bad — certainly, the paper weight is kind of thin because they have to work with the home printer, but otherwise, you can get a really nice looking and professional invitation out of them if the printer settings are correct. Certainly not anything like super professional heavy weight printed invites, but they work well enough. However, adding Microsoft Word + Curlz + amateur typography would just ruin the whole effect.

In short, I think that home printers can work, we just got to work on the quality of the typography. Of course, when I add a professional printing option to my application, that'll be the best solution. :)

If you don't want raised lettering I think you could get away with it, if you have the correct starting resources.

My wife created our wedding invitations, meal cards, etc... at home a couple years ago when we were getting married to save some cash. We bought our stationary items at LCI Paper company (cost around ~$120) and a HP Laser Printer on Amazon for another ~$100). We designed everything in MS Office 2007, and did some funky stuff with margins to print to the end of pages (our printer wouldn't print to the end of the page, others do). All in all it was a pretty easy process, my wife is pretty artistic and most people were pretty taken back that we created them.

My advice to those doing this is to start early, take your time (finding new fonts, looking at existing invitations, etc...) & find a printer that prints to the end of paper (although not a deal breaker I found by fudging wild margins).

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