Wedding Invitations

There is a little less than a month now before the RSVP date for the wedding and as we eagerly await the final replies (no doubt we will be chasing up more than a few people by the looks of things..) I thought I'd dedicate this post to our wedding invites. I have to say, they turned out exactly the way Mr Ng and I wanted them to. We've also received so many compliments on them, and more than a few 'best invites I've ever seen', which is so great to hear when there is so much other stress-inducing wedding crap going on.

Shortly after we got engaged last year, Mr Ng and I went to Hong Kong and were able to attend a wedding showcase at the Intercontinental:

And it was here we were introduced to a company called Studio M which specialises in wedding invitations. We met and spoke with Malia, the company's managing and creative director, who was so lovely and professional I was convinced I wanted the invites to be done by them.
Since the wedding is in Hong Kong, I knew I wanted the invitations to have an Asian influence as well as be in both English and Chinese, however Mr Ng was adamant that he didn't want it to be your typical red and gold Chinese invite. Which is how we came to really like this particular invite by Studio M:

I knew that the colours we chose for the invite would have to coincide with the colour scheme for the rest of the wedding (since I am very annoying and like everything to match) and so after a quick consultation with our parents on whether the colour would be too 'white' and getting the a-ok from them, we decided on ivory and gold. I also find that ivory and gold really matches the whole 'feel' of the Peninsula really well.

Fast forward about a year and we really started to seriously think about the invites beyond what colour we wanted them to be. And although I still had my heart set on Studio M, I quickly changed my mind when our wedding planner informed us that they charge about HKD40,000 per set of tailor made invites, although with our small quantity we could expect to pay about 30% less. Well that was the end of Studio M! There was no way we were going to pay that much for only 100 invites.

We still wanted something very much along the lines of the Studio M design, and so our planners gave us a couple more options from different places which were slightly better but still much more than what we were hoping to pay: HKD23,000 from a place called Progressive Press and HKD29,000 from a place called 983 Wedding. But again, we weren't prepared to pay that much for such a small number of invites.

So after a bit of googling, I stumbled upon a place called Joy's Card which had some really great designs on their website. And this one in particular caught my eye:

Coincidentally, the planners also recommended Joy's as an option for us the day after I stumbled upon them and so we told them we were interested in this particular design but in ivory and gold as opposed to the red and gold and they got back to us with the following quote:

請柬 7"x7" 左右三摺咭互裱, 內貼三張單咭/加貼袋連普通信封. (3-fold invitation, ~7" W x7" L, 3 inserts/labels glue to the card + 1 pocket and envelope)
$33 X 100 張(piece) = $3300 + 咭面英文Logo燙金電版(logo gold foil stamping on the cover) $100 + 咭內單色啡平印(single brown color printing for insert text) $700
= $4100

Accommodation Listing Card
6"x 6" 單咭(不包信封,單色啡平印 - single insert/card without envelope, single brown color printing)
$6 x 100張 = $600 + $350單色啡平印(single brown color printing)
= $950

回覆咭是包信封 (RSVP card with envelope)
6"x4.25" 單咭, 單色啡平印 (single insert/card, single brown color printing)
$5x100張 = $500 + $350(咭平印單色 - single color printing) + $350(信封平印單色 - envelope single color printing) = $1200

Coming to a grand total of HKD6,250 - now this amount we could live with!

My only concern was that the colours wouldn't be the exact ones we wanted - matte gold as opposed to a shiny gold and ivory as opposed to white - and so back in April when Mr Ng and I were in HK for a quick trip over the Easter weekend we popped into Joy's to confirm the final draft and the colours. We also decided to add an extra card with Tea Ceremony information which cost HKD350 for 50 cards.

A little more than a month later they were ready (please excuse the poor quality phone camera photos):

The inside (we chose a light brown font colour at the recommendation of our planners and I think it turned out really well):

And putting it all together:

I managed to track down these special Love postage stamps for the RSVP envelopes at one of the Australia Post shops in the city which I thought complemented the cream envelopes very nicely indeed:

I always find that including an RSVP card and reply paid envelope is a nice touch as opposed to providing just an email address and/or mobile number.

So there you have it! They were actually alot bigger IRL than we had expected and so we had to hand deliver almost all of them which thankfully wasn't too much trouble given the small number of guests (although we did encounter a few mailboxes that were too small for the invitations which was quite amusing). But in short, I highly recommend Joy's Card for all your invitation needs, we really couldn't have been happier with the outcome.