Luxury Elegant Wedding Invitations

PERSONALISED WEDDING INVITATIONS LONDON

As personal to you as the clothes that you wear, we believe your wedding invitations should reflect your personal taste which is why we offer invites that are not just traditional wedding invitations but also those with a more contemporary feel. Many of the wedding invitation ideas have been created by our own in-house team whilst others have been fashioned by illustrators and designers from around the world. All are produced here in the UK.

Stylish and lovingly crafted contemporary and traditional wedding invitations

Our delightful range of personalised wedding invitations are as individual as they are varied and require a similarly varied array of techniques in their production. Many are at least in part lovingly crafted by hand or require a precision and delicacy of manufacture that uses time honoured methods and traditional printing techniques in their production. Others embrace modern digital technology to produce the colourful designs that have been created for us by our international designers. Whether created on antique printing presses for embossed wedding invitations or the most modern of machinery, all our bespoke wedding invitations are made to the highest standards so you can be assured of a high quality product every time.

Help and Guidance with your designs and wedding invitation wording

We have been involved in helping brides and their families with their luxury wedding Invitations for more than 20 years and during this time we have been asked all sorts of questions ranging from the very simple to the weird and wonderful. Based on this experience, we are very conscious that no two weddings are the same so please feel free to ask us about anything. Things to consider might include the time of year of the wedding and any relevant colour schemes. If you are holding the wedding in a specific location you might like the colour scheme to complement the wedding venue or the location and this especially applies if you are getting married abroad. When it comes etiquette and the classic wedding invitation wording, we have encountered some unusual issues over the years, some involving delicate family politics so we have plenty of experience in this field. Do please also refer to our blog in the “notebook” section for more tips on wording etiquette. Paper weights and colours come in abundance but can sometimes be limited by the choice of print process which you are looking to use, but don't worry, we will know what works and what will not. Do please also bear in mind that many of our custom wedding invitations are designs in which the fonts and ink colours cannot be altered.

I am having a very traditional wedding and would like to include RSVP cards, is there anything else that should be sent with my wedding invitations?

Depending on the location of the wedding, whereby your guests may need specific details on accommodation, travel details and other useful local information then we would recommend including a wedding information card. These sheet or card would come as a single card or if you have more information than usual we would create a folded card, kind of like a booklet. We would keep to the same style as the invitation itself in terms of font, paper or card colour and ink colour. 

When to send wedding invitations

By working backwards from the date of the wedding, we can then determine when it might be best for you to send out your bespoke wedding invitations. As a general rule, we would recommend posting the cards two months before the big day although this can be influenced not just by the time of year in which you are holding the celebration but also the geographical spread of your guests and whether or not you have sent out wedding save the dates. If you are getting married overseas or in a location which has limited accommodation in the local area then we would recommend sending out the invites 3 months in advance.

Ordering process and Delivery

In terms of the production lead time for the invitations themselves, we generally need between 7- 10 working days from sign off of the proof and in view of this we would recommend the order process begin three months in advance of the wedding day, just to be on the safe side. However, when very short of time we can sometimes accommodate a faster turn-around for small premium.

We are able to deliver to anywhere in London on a same day basis for which courier charges will apply, whereas for the rest of the UK we use Parcel Force and you can expect your invitations to arrive with you on the day following despatch from our office. For International customers we use Fed EX and can ship to any country serviced by them but typical shipping times for Europe , the US and Far East are 1-3 working days.

How inviting to a wedding has changed over the centuries

Wedding invitations as we know them today are typically relatively formal, written communications inviting the recipient to attend a wedding; but it was not always so. For centuries, the majority of our forebears were illiterate, with only scholars, monks and some of the nobility able to read and write. Whilst the invention, in the Middle Ages, of the printing press and of moveable type by Johannes Gutenberg provided the means, the general lack of literacy still confined hand-scribed or printed invitations to the nobility and the literate elite, such that most invitations were conveyed orally.

In England, this news would be broadcast in the streets by the Town Crier, with the result that those within earshot often became de facto guests. By 1600, however, improvements in general literacy led to an increase in both written and printed invitations and the practice of announcing a wedding in the broadsheets and newspapers of the day was established. By 1642 the invention of metal-plate engraving by Ludwig von Siegen brought about a significant improvement in the quality of invitations that could be produced, as until then these had been functional rather than stylish. As the term implies, embossed wedding invitations require a skilled craftsman to scratch the invitation lettering into a metal plate using a graving tool. The ‘engraver’ was in effect handwriting the invitation in reverse onto the plate so that the recesses of the plate, when inked, would deliver a ‘right-reading’ invitation when brought into contact with the card under great pressure on the die press.

Further improvements and developments in printing techniques and processes can be directly linked to the spread and development of ever more beautiful wedding invitations. With the Industrial Revolution came the invention of Lithography, a process which immeasurably improved the sharpness of the printed word on the page when compared to moveable type. So, it is to lithography that we can attribute the emergence of wedding invitations that would become attainable for the majority of the populace and it is to rapid industrial growth and democracy in the years after World War II that delivered the means for the man-in-the-street to ape the lifestyles and social mores of society’s elite. In this they were guided by social commentators and the lifestyle gurus of their day.

One final process development also served to establish a stunning growth in the number and variety of classic wedding invitations and that was the introduction of a new method of raised printing called thermography. Sometimes called ‘poor man’s engraving’ this new method brought with it the kudos of printed text that has been raised from the surface of the page without the need to engrave a copper plate. Taken together, all these developments in society at large and also in wedding invitation printing techniques have ensured that traditional wedding invitations are now able to reflect the style, taste and aspirations of the sender.