When should you send out your wedding invitations? The short answer is 2 to 3 months before your wedding. Now for the long answer to this question, let’s start from the beginning! When should you start designing your wedding invitations?
This is a question we get asked a lot from brides and grooms. Our answer, is that there’s no such thing as too early! Though a typical timeline would be 4 months before your wedding day. But when you should start designing your wedding invitations depends on the design and complexity of it. A more simple, one-layer invitation can have a quick turnaround time of a couple of days depending on the company you order from. Often online invitation websites are faster compared to your local boutique invitation design company. You can expect handmade invitations or anything unique such as laser cut invitations, wood, acrylic, scroll or boxed invitations to take anywhere from 4 to 8 weeks to produce, that’s from the time you have your design finalized and ready for production, so start designing even earlier than 4 months prior to your wedding. You may or may not know what you prefer for your wedding invitations so the length of the design process can vary. If you’re choosing from pre-designed templates, that will be faster than if you’re designing your wedding invitations from scratch.
Wedding invitations are usually sent out 2 to 3 or even 4 months before the date of your wedding as some couples prefer. This does not only allow guests time to reply, but it allows you plenty of time to run after guests who hasn’t replied. Once you know how many guests and who will be attending your wedding, you then have to arrange your seating arrangements and let the venue know how many guests they need to prepare for. Working out your seating arrangements, especially with a larger guest list, is not a quick and easy task and could be stressful if you’re trying to please everyone! After all your guests have replied and seating arrangements done, your job isn’t finished yet! You still have to send the guest list to your stationer or printing company to prepare either a seating chart, escort cards and/or place cards. So planning ahead and having the RSVP date earlier could help your stress level go down a little if you’re not leaving this task until the last minute. I’m sure there will be plenty of other last minute wedding tasks you will have to attend to!
BONUS TIP: Remember to also design your wedding day stationery earlier. These items might include the already mentioned seating chart, escort cards or place cards as well as table numbers, menus and don’t forget favor tags! You should design all these individual pieces when you place your invitation order so you already have the design part checked off your to-do list.
