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Print Your Wedding Stationery Locally or Use the Big Box Company? Here’s the Scoop. 

About The Author

We work alongside many brides and mothers-of-the-brides, and we feel pretty confident that we have this procedure down pat after many years of wedding experience. We suggest starting your wedding stationery planning with a good ol’ Pinterest search for unique layouts that catch your eye and fit the vision of your own day in some way. Canva is a great place to start playing with layouts. Pro tip: make sure to compare wording with other wedding save-the-dates, invites, information cards, etc. that were on the internet so you don’t forget anything. Once you have some ideas, consider how you want your stationery created and produced. Do you want to work with a local print shop or do it all online using a big box company? Here are the pros and cons of printing local.

Pros of Printing Local:

Unique and Completely Yours: There will not be another bride who used the same stationery as you, because you made it yourself! The font, the colors, the design is completely styled by you and allows you to give your guests a first look at what your day would look like through stationery. This is a big deal to a lot of brides and we understand why!

Flexible Printing Options: Working with your local print shop, it’s easy to send the files and choose the color, feel and size of the cardstock they have to print invites on. You are the one in charge of how inexpensive/expensive invites can get because you get to choose any of the bells and whistles they may have to offer. We can’t forget to mention you won’t have to pay any shipping, since you probably live within driving distance of the business!

You also get to print as many or as little as you want going local. Let’s say you started off with 275 invitations, and learned you needed more ASAP. All you have to do is send over an email asking for 25 more, and they can likely be printed for you as early as the next business day. 

Cost Effective: You won’t pay an artist fee for work that isn’t exactly how you want it to look! You can plan on spending much less printing your own custom work through a local business versus choosing a big stationery company that can nickel and dime you for extras and add-ons. 

Printed Proofs: By printing locally, it is easy to ask for a proof prior to printing 300+ invites to make sure it looks exactly how you want prior to living on a prayer and hoping you didn’t make any errors before pressing “purchase”. 

Cons of Printing Local:

Devotion of Time: You may spend a lot of time on stationery depending on how involved in the process you want to be. If you design the stationery yourself vs. utilizing the services of a professional artist, you risk hours of time making sure the spacing is right, the layout is appealing to the eye, having correct bloodlines for the printers to do their thing, etc. 

Add-On Options: Since you’re not ordering from a big stationery company, you may overlook the option to “include” letters, information cards, belly bands or wax shells. We never want to oversell you! But you may not be aware of what your options can be, unless you ask. A lot of brides like to keep it simple and only add letters and address labels to cut down costs. 

Design Prowess: We get that not everyone is able or even wants to design their own stationery. It is a lot of work! But, there are other ways to get around this and still have unique stationery for your big day. Etsy sells PDF documents of custom stationery that artists create for couples who want something a little more unique than what big box companies like Minted, Zola and Shutterfly may offer. You can purchase the rights to the PDF and send that to your local print shop to have them print the invites for you. This option can still be a cheaper alternative to the big companies mentioned above! 

At the end of the day, going local and creating your own, unique stationery for your big day can be very prideful. Being able to talk to a real person and not go through customer service hiccups will expedite this process and will make things much smoother. A printed proof of your design is especially nice to share and have family and friends critique prior to printing the hundreds of copies and potentially being stuck with errors. If you are eager to give your wedding day a stand out look, we cannot recommend enough going local and designing or paying for a small artist to give you a custom look for way less. 

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