Thursday, March 17, 2005
New Introductions to our Blank Wedding Programs
Up until recently, we have simply resold blank wedding programs that have been printed by commercial printers. We must confess, we felt that there might be room for some improvement in the available designs, as lovely as most of them are. The first area of improvement is the weight of the programs, many of which were used for covers, and the second area is the designs themselves.
Most of the covers we've seen and are still selling weigh between 24 lbs. and 28 lbs. at most, and we felt that they should be a little more substantial at 32 lbs, particularly if the bride is planning to punch two holes at the center and thread ribbon through. We didn't want anything heavier than that because most covers are booklet style and will have to be bent in the middle. In addition, wedding programs are usually stacked together and placed at or near the entrance to the church, and if the paper were too thick there would be difficulty making a neat stack, especially if there were a large number of programs.
The next area we felt could improve were the designs of the covers themselves. We've seen some lovely covers, but they didn't seem to take into account the colors of a wedding, or the theme of a wedding if there was one. Some of the loveliest had religious sayings on the front, which excluded those who might be of another religion than Christian, or who were planning a civil ceremony.
We have never done commercial printing at ThinkWedding, so before we could implement our ideas there was the issue of equipment, expertise, and supply. We spent some time locating two suppliers of the covers we wanted, at the price we knew we had to have if we were to keep our covers reasonable. Then we had to locate the printing equipment that would accurately print the colors we wanted, as fast as we needed, and again at the price that would keep us competitive.
Then, we had to develop the designs, and learn to run the printing equipment so that it would produce the high quality we knew we had to have to sell the blank wedding programs to our brides. Well, it took us a year, but we now have some initial designs, and we have acquired the equipment, expertise, and suppliers--and we're ready to go! We were a little amazed at the response, though. We haven't had our line of blank wedding programs on our website for more than about a week, and we've already had several orders for them, so we believe that we're on the right track.
Here are are very first designs. All are 8.5" x 11" bifolds; the design is on the front cover. We would certainly welcome your opinion; we're new to this. More information about these designs are available on our page here.
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| Pink Rose Border | Pink Calla Lilies | Lavender Roses | Lavender, Blue or Pink Lace Border |
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| Periwinkle Roses | Blue Flower Border |
We're particularly proud of our lavender roses and periwinkle roses programs. We had a great deal of difficulty getting the colors right. Periwinkle is a popular color for weddings, but there doesn't seem to be much out there in the way of stationery, programs or wrappers in that color.
We have a number of other designs in the works right now, including beach theme programs, and western theme programs, as well as religious themes, and we expect to have them up on our website by about next Monday, March 21st.
