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How formal to make your wedding is an artistic question.  But all too often young, cool couples sabotage themselves because they’re too embarassed to do it right.  Casual can still be 100% artistically correct, so don’t let cheap be an excuse to look cheap, or informal be an excuse to look insincere.

Memorize this one line I’ve used for a decade now, “For every dollar you save in invitations, you’ll sacrifice $5 in gifts.”  I know you’re not allowed to think like that, but seriously, if you spent $100 on invitations because “that’s all [you] could afford,” guess how much your average gift would be?  $10 probably.  Now if you spent $800 on those same people, your average gift would go up to $50 apiece. 

These were my wedding invitations:

Those were casual, with butterflies, two different fonts, a vellum cover and periwinkle ink.  Yet they were gorgeous.  And because of doing casual right, we got hundreds of gifts that cost a good amount apiece.  Again, I know that’s not why you’re getting married and how dare I see your grandmother as a number.  But for those of you who have nothing, the most of you who are getting married young and actually need a microwave, don’t sell yourself short by making your invitations look cheap.

The difference in what you’d order and what the Queen of England would order for wedding invitations isn’t visible.  It’s in the type of printing, the quality of paper—all sorts of variables I could write books about.  But it’s not anything your mother’s friends can tell from 3 feet away.  For that matter it’s not anything the Queen of England can tell from 3 feet away.  It consists entirely of traditional things you have to be trained to see…

Please respond below with your questions or comments.

Popularity: 34% [?]

Every bride that has walked in the door for the past 10 years has made the same jokes.  They thumb through the binders and all stop to giggle at the same invitations.  There are the couples who both look like men, or both look like women; the invitations with motorcycles or cowboys or frogs or barbed wire; and then there’s every reception card that invites people to an “adult reception.”  “What,” you may ask, “is an adult reception?”  I, like you, can only assume it means a reception without kids.  Some people have the kind of weddings where specifically warning people not to bring families is a good way to start a family.  “But there at least must be a better way to phrase it.”  Yes, there is.  Here are some ideas:

1. First off, if you’re going to have a de facto anti-kids event, you need to have other events with kids.  That’s just polite.
2. Hire a babysitter for another part of the building.
3. Throw a kids’ event at the same time (for $50 you can rent out any dollar theater in town to show whatever movie you want.)  The kids don’t want to be at your stuffy old reception any more than you want their stinky young selves there.
4. Even for free, just put a movie on a DVD player somewhere else in the building.  You don’t have to mandate that the kids stay in that room, but they will…
5. The most polite way, although perhaps not as effective, to ward off kids is to specifically list those invited on the inner envelope.  Standard etiquette says that while on an outer envelope you put people’s postal titles (”Dick Jensen”), on the inside you put “Mr. and Mrs. Richard Jensen” (or, more casually, ”Dick and Sonja Jensen.”)  In either case, people are meant to take that as “you two are invited.”  Even doing this for a living, I was surprised how many single people called me to ask if they could bring a date to my reception!  (Of course “Dick Jensen and guest” if they’re single is a good option.)  So then if you want kids, you put “The Dick Jensen family” or something similar.  Even if you only want specific friends (like your buddy and his parents), put “Dick, Sonja, and Kim Jensen.”
6. “No kids, please” is a really tacky thing to put in my opinion.
7. Send out a list of reliable babysitters in the area.  No, you wouldn’t enclose this in your invitation.  But you may already have a small travel packet for those who are coming to the area.  You probably have a guest’s daughter already who could babysit, and you can ask her.  But a list like this would be a nice thing to email around casually after the invitation goes out, through your mother’s grapevine, or on your wedding website.

Please respond below with any comments or questions.

Popularity: 37% [?]

When I ran a bridal magazine, we had plenty of photographers who had five phone numbers on their ad—one for Utah, one for New York, one for Paris, etc. Almost invariably these five numbers all went to the same person. The reason they had a bunch of numbers was a) to make them look big, and b) so they could charge you a different amount based on which number you called. Try it. Grab a magazine and call two of their numbers, asking the same question. I knew photographers, videographers, cake makers—you name it—who would say “$1000″ if you called them on their Utah number, and “$15,000″ if you called them on their New York number. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing—it’s just market forces doing their job—but it’s something to know, especially if you’re planning a wedding in New York (or San Francisco or Los Angeles or any of the other randomly expensive places.) In the rawest supply-and-demand sense, there will be more weddings and therefore more competition and therefore a) better prices relative to b) higher quality in Provo or Salt Lake than in Beverly Hills. The Beverly Hills ones will be amazing, but there won’t be many of them and they’ll be viciously expensive. Plus they won’t glow at your wedding, and that was a major concern for us.

So most couples, when looking for a photographer, just open their yellow pages. They don’t even look outside their county. Why? Because you’re young, and you think small. Making a long distance call, albeit free, is still a psychological barrier for most people. But the bottom line is that most of you will not spend any more money, and will often save money, by conducting a nationwide search for your wedding vendors. Using the example above, you could fly a photographer from Utah to New York far cheaper than you could hire the basest amateur in New York. When I got married, I lived in Utah, got married in Arizona, and had an open house in California. The assumption of anyone in my position would be to hire everyone out of Arizona. Quite the contrary, I, working in this industry and knowing exactly what I was doing, flew in a photographer, videographer, and cake maker; and it was cheaper and higher quality than getting the above in Phoenix. My photographer was one of the top magazine photographers in the region, who had taken many famous pictures I was immediately familiar with—and I got him for I believe $2300 (in 2002), including two photographers, two events, two flights and eight hours of driving. Yes, the prices varied that much, even between Salt Lake and Phoenix. I’m from San Francisco, and out there I wouldn’t have been able to get a college student to do it for that price.

So no matter where you’re at, no matter how large or small your town, remember that it’s a small world, and there may be no finanicial or logistical reason to settle for whoever’s in your town for any aspect of your wedding. Your dress, your invitations, your photography, your video—picking the right person, no matter his location, is not a corner you’ll receive a marginal benefit by cutting.

Popularity: 35% [?]

Brides constantly call to set an appointment, and end up picking a time three weeks from now “because it’s the only night [the groom] can be there.”  I have to politely explain, and explain again, that the groom doesn’t want to be there.  I’ve seen many a groom storm out frustrated, because there’s no time where the discrepancy is more evident between decision making styles than when shopping for invitations.  In fact, I would always leave a TV on muted across the room, so if a bride did bring her groom he could stare at the screen and zone out rather than getting angry and ruin her day.  Let me be very Mars & Venus in saying, and girls, memorize this forever, “Men don’t like choices.  They like vetoes.”  What I mean by that is I’ve never yet seen a man who wants to choose a top 50 list and whittle it down to a top 40 and eventually a top 3 over the course of hours and hours and hours.  After years of working in invitations, I couldn’t handle that myself when my wife started the process.  Men don’t need choices.  What men need, however, is veto power.  They never want to see the top 50, but they always want to see the top 6.  So for your first visit to the invitations store, don’t bring your groom–or bring him, but don’t get mad if he pulls out his iPod and starts watching Family Guy.  Sometime on your second or third visit, bring him.  Make him feel like he made the final choice and negotiated a price you couldn’t have gotten without him.  That’ll make your shopping experience pleasant and will save you all kinds of young couple agony as you learn to make decisions together and throughout your life.  And PS, read Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus sometime–hopefully together.

Popularity: 58% [?]

Part of my job helping people through the process of designing invitations is to teach them what corners they can cut according to their budget or artistic preferences.  An RSVP card is one of these.  It is simply a logistical and perhaps mathematical decision whether to include an RSVP card.  This is because the RSVP serves two purposes: First, it helps you budget your event.  Second, it gets one more piece of stress off your mother’s back.

Simply put, if in some aspect of your event you are paying per person, you will easily pay off the additional $50 the RSVP cards will cost.  In fact, if you’re having a catered reception meal, you may be paying close to $50 a person, and therefore being one person more accurate will pay off those RSVP cards–and you will be at least one person more accurate.

If not, it may still be worth the money if your mother needs to know those specifics to stay calm.  A stressed out mother will really affect the tone of the event.  Imagine having a large framed photo of your family at your wedding on your wall for the rest of your life where, whether anyone else can see it or not, you know that your mother is so freaked out she’s wearing a fake smile.  Isn’t that worth $50?  It’s up to you. 

After both those explanations, I guess I am a fan of RSVP cards for those planning big events.  So if your wedding is unlike those on TV, a $3000 wedding with a static table of Hors d’œuvres, and your personality doesn’t lend to freaking out, it may not be worth it for you…  But if you’re planning a $20,000+ wedding, with a sit-down dinner and you have the kind of mother who can afford that kind of stuff because she’s such a domineering stress case in her corporate life, don’t mess with the tone of your wedding over a $50 upgrade.

Popularity: 66% [?]