Advice for Posting Wedding Invitations

Bor­ing maybe, but essen­tial? Probably…

Post­ing wed­ding Invi­ta­tions.… This could be said to be con­sid­ered a bit of a bor­ing post topic but send­ing invi­ta­tions by the mail is some­thing many peo­ple get­ting mar­ried will have to do and needs to be taken into account espe­cially if your bud­get is tight.

In the UK it can also be a con­fus­ing process. Hope­fully this arti­cle will help shed some light on how to suc­cess­fully nav­i­gate Royal Mail and post­ing your wed­ding invi­ta­tions.  I’ve been involved in run­ning a bespoke wed­ding sta­tionery busi­ness in Som­er­set for sev­eral years now and so have sent a lot of items through the post as most of my clients are not in Som­er­set. Royal Mail has now care­fully defined what a let­ter is and is not.  It’s not as sim­ple as enve­lope or box.  It’s all defined by size and weight.   There are two cat­e­gories of letter.

Post­ing Wed­ding Invi­ta­tions: Letter

The Let­ter cat­e­gory is defined as less than 5mm thick and less than 16.5 cm on the short­est side and 24 cm on the longest side.  Let­ters can be sent with a sin­gle stan­dard 1^st or 2^nd class stamp as your card will qual­ify as a stan­dard let­ter.  A C5 enve­lope is about the largest size you can send which are the envelopes intended for an A5 card.

Just be wary of items get­ting nearer the 5 mm thick­ness may be marked or dented when going through the sort­ing machin­ery so you may wish to con­sider one of the options listed later.  If they exceed 5mm your guests may get a bill and a mes­sage to please col­lect from a sort­ing office  rather than your invitation.

If you are unsure post offices gen­er­ally have items for check­ing the post in them. Prop­erly attached crys­tals can go through the post with­out addi­tional pro­tec­tion than the enve­lope but other dec­o­ra­tion may suf­fer. You can get some boxes which just about fit these dimen­sions but I’ve not seen one that is very sturdy myself. C5, C6, C7 and DL are all stan­dard ‘let­ter’ sizes.

Post­ing Wed­ding Invi­ta­tions: Large Letter

Nowhere does it say that a let­ter or large let­ter has to be in an enve­lope, there­fore it is pos­si­ble to send boxes which con­firm to these size guide lines.  This can be help­ful as when post­ing larger cards where the thick­ness is near or more than 5mm or where there is elab­o­rate dec­o­ra­tion on the front such as bows, crys­tals, flow­ers or other dec­o­ra­tions then you may want to pro­tect the invi­ta­tion as the post can be quite a hos­tile place for care­fully made and del­i­cate wed­ding invitations.

The most eco­nom­i­cal way to do this is to use post­ing boxes.  These pro­vide a hard pro­tec­tion around the invi­ta­tion. To qual­ify as a large let­ter your items must be less than 25 cm on the short side and on the 35.3cm longest side with a total thick­ness under 2.5cm, most mag­a­zines are mailed as this cat­e­gory.  There is a weight limit of 750 grams.

The price of postage changes by weight, less than 100 grams being the cheap­est, less than 250 grams the next price tier. For any­one who has had sam­ples from Artemis Sta­tionery we rarely exceed 250g with our samples.

From April 2013 the price for large let­ters less than 100g is 69p for 2^nd class and 90p for 1^st class.  For these you can pur­chase spe­cific 1^st and 2^nd class large let­ter stamps.  Under 250g it is £1.10 and £1.20.   For the other weights you will need to add addi­tional stamps although you can use other stamps to make up the total.  Eg for 1^st class large under 250g we use two 1^st class stamps which costs 60p each or for 2^nd class under 250g we use one stan­dard 1^st class stamp and one 2^nd(60p and 50p mak­ing £1.10).

When choos­ing post­ing boxes, we find by far the most durable to be made of sin­gle walled card­board rather than just card.  Search­ing for pric­ing in pro­por­tion or PIP postal boxes can be done through Google and should bring ample results.  They nor­mally come in a brown card but are not the most aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing.  That doesn’t mean you can’t present the inside well. Glossy boxes with a white or coloured card fin­ish can be pur­chased though are less durable.

Post­ing Wed­ding Invi­ta­tions: Parcels

You may won­der how a wed­ding invi­ta­tion can be a par­cel — well any­thing thicker than 25mm or 2.5 cm (about an inch) is auto­mat­i­cally a par­cel.  This means that some of the pre­sen­ta­tion boxes and many scroll invites must go as parcels.  For scrolls this can be quite bad news as they’re gen­er­ally a more afford­able type of invi­ta­tion but if you have to post them you will need a box and they will most likely be a small par­cel.  This will cost either £3.00 or £2.60 for 1^st and 2^ndclass parcels respec­tively.  Those prices are for weights up to a Kg which should cover most invites!

British Postal sizes for wed­ding invi­ta­tions and let­ters etc

Con­clu­sions

So what does this all mean?  Well, firstly if you’re mak­ing your own invi­ta­tions and send­ing them through the mail I would say send a test, espe­cially if it’s a craft style invi­ta­tion with bits that may get dam­aged.  You also need to bear in mind the var­i­ous sizes and their costs.  If your on a tight bud­get don’t design some­thing that would have to be sent as a large let­ter or small parcel.

Sec­ondly if you have to go the box route you don’t have to stress that you’re send­ing your lovely invites in an ugly brown card­board box.  You can still use a really nice enve­lope inside, the box is just the ves­sel.  Even lux­ury sports cars turn up at their show­room on the back of a car trans­porter.  But you can be fancier.  Print nice labels to cover the out­side.  Tis­sue paper to wrap the invi­ta­tion and its enve­lope.  You could make your own stick­ers to com­pli­ment these.

Thirdly, post­ing can be expen­sive.  Con­script­ing friends and fam­ily to deliver any nearby invi­ta­tions is a solu­tion that may save money (though maybe not if too much petrol comes into it) and the has­sle of stress­ing postal siz­ing and whether you need use postal boxes is avoided.

I hope this arti­cle has been of help.  Good luck with send­ing out your invi­ta­tions.  If you like the look of the invi­ta­tion used in the top of the image and would like to see more of my work you can see it on my main web­site.  This is Artemis Sta­tionery which sells per­son­alised and bespoke wed­ding invi­ta­tions across the UK and Europe.  I also have a blog which is full of gen­eral wed­ding and wed­ding sta­tionery advice called AS Invites, I would love for you to come along and take a look.