It’s all about wedding stationery today with our Belle Bride Caroline who is tying the knot on June 20th 2020 at Château de la Garde. A gorgeous stationery suite is a must for all destination weddings, it’s the perfect first impression for your guests and makes for gorgeous styling for your photographer on the day! With so many options though it can be a bit of a minefield. Therefore we think you’ll fine Caroline’s experience helpful in the search for your own destination wedding stationery.
We’ll now hand you over to Caroline…
Hello French Wedding Style Readers !
I hope that you had a great holiday season and that like me you are full of energy again to continue working on the wedding organization, I am joking but there is some truth in it. Organizing your wedding is almost like having a second full time job as it is always in your head during the day (sometimes even at night), everything you look at on the Internet is wedding related (inspiration, tips, providers) and you also need alignment and budget meetings with your Fiancé… so “YES!” you sometimes need a holiday from it to find again the motivation and the energy to go on and check some more boxes from the never ending wedding planning list!
This summer, as we couldn’t book any wedding providers because they were “on hold” with providing custom quotes due to the busy wedding season, we have focused on finding our destination wedding stationery. Unexpectedly it has been the biggest challenge until now. Indeed, as the wedding invitations are the first impression that your guests will have from your wedding, it has to be just right! This is why we have looked at dozens of wedding stationery providers, at thousands of designs and what really helped us in the end was to receive some (free) samples to have a real look and feel. So after having sounded from top to bottom what the Internet has to offer in terms of wedding stationery, we had selected two finalist websites: minted. and Cotton Bird
However it has been difficult to choose between them because they both have their pros and cons.
For example what is great with minted. is that they offer the printing of the addresses on the envelopes (which was a decisive point for me because I always find such a pity when we receive a beautiful wedding invitation but that the address is hand-written by a non-graphic-designer on the envelope i.e. by someone like me! On the other hand, the wedding stationary suite from Cotton Bird is really complete and outstanding, they even have small boxes for your guest wedding favors, candles and paper fans all in the same design as the one from your wedding invitations. So in the end I decided to take the best of both websites i.e. we will be using Minted for our wedding invitations and Cotton Bird for the stationery on our wedding day (Church booklets, horns for the flower petals, table numbers, place tags, menus, etc.).
After having chosen our destination wedding stationery design (click here to have a look at it), our current challenge is the wording, and this in two languages ! Even if we decided for a short and concise wedding invitation, it is still a real brain teaser to formulate each sentence, to decide for the style (formal vs. modern) and to translate at best in the other language. In addition to our paper invitations, all the details regarding program, wedding party, travel, accommodation but also RSVP will be on our matching wedding website (graciously provided by minted. although they also have a Premium option available).
If you have clicked on the above link you can see that we have decided ourselves for a botanic design with peach and green colors as we want flowers to hold an important place in our wedding decoration. I am also planning on using our wedding invitations design to work with my decorator florist (still to be hired btw) in order to match our wedding day decoration with our wedding stationery.
So as you understood I am now actively searching for a decorator florist in order to clarify an important part of our budget and see how much will be left for all the other things that we want to do/buy to spoil our guests on our wedding day.
Finally, I just wanted to share with you that even though we didn’t send any invitations (yet), some of our German located guests have already booked their flights and accommodation and it is a great feeling to know that we have such excited and motivated guests! We will never be able thank them enough to fly along with us until France to share our “I do!” moment.
Cheers,
Caroline
If you would like to read more from our belle brides you can do so here.
Top Image by Furtive Photographie
