Everyone knows that preparing and culling your wedding guest list is one of the most fraught areas of wedding planning. When my fiance and I got engaged in May, a good friend of mine who got engaged about six months earlier gave me a really prescient piece of advice from experience: Send Paperless Post Save the Dates the second you book your date.
His advice was wise. He and his fiance hadn’t sent the save the dates, so they didn’t know how many of their A-list invites will or won’t make it until just a few months from their actual wedding date. That gives them very little time to invite their B-List to fill in for people who can’t attend and it also will make it very obvious to their B-List that they weren’t a priority.
So, with his advice in mind, we began scrolling Paperless Post. With our budget, we knew we didn’t want to send physical save the dates, so Paperless Post seemed like a cost-efficient way to send the wedding information to our guest list without sacrificing the style elements and luxury of a physical save the date. Plus, it’s eco-friendly, which is a big bonus given all of the unnecessary consumption that goes into wedding planning.
Once we logged into Paperless Post, I was blown away by the number of options for a Save The Date. The aesthetic was just really beautiful and felt high-end, and it had great customizable elements to it when it came to font, “stamps,” and color scheme. If you want one to feature a photo of the two of you, there are ample options. There are also tons with eclectic creative and art elements.
I had a hard time choosing our invites because there were so many beautiful designs I really loved. We chose a design by Oscar De La Renta in the end which featured a large, vertical photo of us with gold tassels across the front of the photo indicating that this would be a celebration. We then entered the details about our wedding: Date, Place, Time and you can include a message to your guests where you may want to communicate other details. For instance, we told guests that our wedding was on a holiday weekend and that it is an adult-only event, both of which may factor into their ability to join us. They also have a field to share your wedding website, which is something we took advantage of.
Once all of our details were loaded, we hit the “Preview” button to experience the Save The Date like our guests would. One of the features I really enjoy about Paperless Post is that it gives you all of the physical invite experiences of a letter or invite while being eco-friendly and lower-maintenance. Once guests open their email, an envelope appears with their names on it. It then flips over and opens up, exposing the tip of the invite. The invitation is then raised out of its envelope to show you the entire message. Once you scroll down, the details of your event appear as well as your message to guests.
Each of our invites came to 6 coins, or the payment denomination on Paperless Post. There are some invites that are truly free, but the more bells and whistles, the more coins. To give you a frame of reference, 100 coins costs just $20, so we sent these invites for a fraction of the cost of a paper save the date.
What I also REALLY appreciated about Paperless Post is how easy and intuitive it is. Once you get into the thick of wedding planning, your time becomes even more precious and your stress levels hit new heights. We designed our Paperless Post invites in the span of just two hours. It doesn’t get more simple than that.
Sending the save the dates has been super helpful from a planning perspective. It has allowed our best friends and family to book airfare and look into hotels and Airbnbs, ensuring that they will spend the special day with us. It also resulted in some of our far flung friends telling us they won’t be able to make the wedding. This means we get to invite some of our B-list in their place when we send out our physical invites. That’s extremely valuable when you are planning a day with so many moving parts because any early indications of how your guest list is shaping up really can make a big difference in your planning.
Added bonus — Paperless Posts are great for other events around you’re wedding. We will be sending them again for our welcome ceremony and goodbye brunch!
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So exciting!! Congratulations!