For many of our customers, creating their own wedding invitations is something they’ve never tried before. For some, it’s something they’d never even considered. But in today’s economy, people are finding ways to save money. Buying your invitations and envelopes direct from LCI Paper and printing at home is a big money saver and can be quite rewarding in ways other than just financial. One of our customers, Karen Cohen from Massachusetts, and her daughter, Margot, made their first foray into the realm of do it yourself invitations. Earlier this week, Karen spoke to me about her experience.

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Here is a transcript of the interview:

You recently ordered invitations for your daughter’s Bat Mitzvah. Was this a do it yourself project?

Yes. It did end up being a do it yourself project. I went to some stores and I looked through books and I was going to order them the traditional way and never thought about doing them myself. And then a neighbor who does…is very craftsy and makes a lot of cards said, “You know, we could probably come out, you know, with a design that would be even more original and more fun and we could all be a part of it.”

So at first I thought, “No way. You’re crazy, ha ha ha.” And then I thought, “Alright, well, let’s try it.” So we started looking at papers and my daughter… The nice thing was, my 13 year old was able to actually come up with the design. So she got to play around with different ideas. So it was, you know, she became a part of it instead of me just going to a store and ordering them. She actually was able to design her own invitations, you know, with our approval. So that’s how it all got started.

And how did you decide on purchasing from LCI?

Well what happened was we… Everybody said you need to have a sense of the size of the envelopes when you make your invitation. So originally, I didn’t… We just bought some regular paper and didn’t really listen to them and just made our own invitation the size we wanted based on some other invitations I got. Somebody who said they knew about envelopes got me envelopes and said, you know, “This is the only thing you can do for this size.”

And I can’t remember the exact size right now. And I didn’t like them. They were very boring. There was not much to them. I didn’t think they were good quality so I said, you know, “Why don’t I check it out?”

And I went online and saw…put in the size of my envelopes and just some information, and that’s when LCI…I was brought to LCI’s web site which was exceedingly helpful because it actually gave the size of invitations. If it’s this size, this is the envelope. You know? It had a lot of instruction. And I also…it looked like it had a lot of choices. So I was going to buy some envelopes and decided to put my order in. Had some trouble ordering…wasn’t sure how to put in some information which lead me to call LCI and that’s when I started talking to a woman who became…you know, started asking me questions and actually became very helpful to me, ha ha, in a lot of ways. And then I was able to order the envelopes but they also gave me, she also gave me a lot of other good advice in the process. It was Amy. It was Amy. She was really nice. So I called Amy with just how to order, and then she just started on her own asking me questions. Before you know it, I had changed the size. We only had 1 prototype invitation and Amy directed me. Oh, and people told me that the lined envelopes are so expensive, that don’t even bother thinking about doing a lined envelope but I found LCI’s prices were really reasonable and I was able to get a gray lined envelope that matched the invitation. So I ended up changing the size of the invitation a little bit so I could have this envelope and yeah. So then I came into LCI a couple times, as you know, and got more and more information as we went through the process.

And did you print them yourself or did you have someone else print them, or?

My neighbor actually printed them because this was also part of her gift to my daughter. She did the printing through her own computer. We had like a paper cutting party where like 4 of us sat around a table and cut all the paper. Barry gave me a lot of helpful advice also about like how to…the best way to attach… We had like 4 pages of paper that we had to put together and I was gonna just use some cement and he suggested double sided tape. You know, he just gave me some good advice in that regard. So then we ended up…again, we all got together and we had like 4 pieces of paper and we were just kind of like an assembly line attaching the layers of paper. So that worked out well. And Barry helped me also with matching the print colors and, you know, stuff like that, and the size of the print. So that was helpful also.

Well, getting your daughter involved in the choice of the invitation and then having folks over and working on it together sounds really rewarding.

It turned the invitation into such a different experience that I had expected which like I said was to go to a store and just order them and be done. But this became a much more interactive, fun… It was really fun! It was actually fun. It was fun being able to design it. It was fun that we all got together and put them, you know, together working as a team. I think my daughter got a lot of satisfaction. And the feedback’s been tremendous. A lot of the returns mention the invitation and, you know, how it was unique and they loved it. So that’s been, that’s been very nice also.

Thanks to Karen Cohen for taking a few minutes out of her busy day to share her experience designing and assembling her daughter’s Bat Mitzvah invitations. If you enjoyed hearing her story, and you’d like to hear other human interest stories, subscribe to our podcast.

Joshua Birch