This is Tracy (@limedaring), if there are any questions, can also let me know on here. If you're interested, I'm in the Bay Area and will travel to meet people over coffee/lunch!
I probably don't know what the hell I'm talking about, but wouldn't it be a better play to integrate (somehow) with a printing company? Or offer an export option that they can take to a local printer (as in the correct file format .eps, pantone color numbers, or what not).
Sorry if I am completely ignorant to the wedding invitations scene but I would think every girl deserves nice invitations and the convenience of a one-stop-online-shop.
Hmm maybe crowdsourced invitation designs.. ala threadless.com ?
Weddings are generally the ultimate in meet-your-hero-letdown. Everything is fussed about in minute detail, but then it's all over, and you're left thinking 'what was all that for'. The memories of the day and what comes after has zero to do with wedding stationery. I can't even remember what color ours was. I'd rather spend the money and fly in a distant relative or old friend than spend big money on invite printing. Your guests will appreciate and remember hours spent refining a speech over hours fussing about invites and place settings. There is definitely diminishing returns once you get over pre-printed and hand-written invites.
Getting back on-topic : I think you'll do well with this and the wedding industry is over-priced, but a lot of it has to do with ego-management. If I were a photographer or florist, I'd add 20% to the price to put up with all the 'it's got to be perfect' crap that goes with it. Self-serve printing removes all that, so is justified with a lower margin. As long as it looks nice, people will pay the money. You'll be able to pick the cheap paper without someone frowning down your nose saying 'if you really want it to be special...'
I didn't put in all my ideas (since I didn't want to do "this idea, and THIS idea, and THIS idea!") but I think a threadless-like crowdsourcing on invitations would be fantastic, and a great tie-in to a Moo.com like printing ability.
I was surprised how many people use kits — I used to be part of a wedding blog where people loved to build their invites and then show everyone else for critiques. And I would cringe everytime I saw someone using italic Times New Roman because they didn't have access to nicer fonts.
Without the printing I would think of this as more of toy than something that would be truly disruptive. One could charge much larger prices for this service with printing and still be competitive especially when factoring in design selection and ease of use.
Moreover, I worry that launching without a printing service would be a business-killing misfeature. It sets the wrong tone (nobody wants to have their own invites printed) from which it may be hard to recover.
I recognise the founder's desire to handle this in small chunks, but printing... I dunno, I wouldn't look twice without it.
In short, I think that home printers can work, we just got to work on the quality of the typography. Of course, when I add a professional printing option to my application, that'll be the best solution. :)
My wife created our wedding invitations, meal cards, etc... at home a couple years ago when we were getting married to save some cash. We bought our stationary items at LCI Paper company (cost around ~$120) and a HP Laser Printer on Amazon for another ~$100). We designed everything in MS Office 2007, and did some funky stuff with margins to print to the end of pages (our printer wouldn't print to the end of the page, others do). All in all it was a pretty easy process, my wife is pretty artistic and most people were pretty taken back that we created them.
My advice to those doing this is to start early, take your time (finding new fonts, looking at existing invitations, etc...) & find a printer that prints to the end of paper (although not a deal breaker I found by fudging wild margins).
Good luck. But understand that the printing industry (again, at least here in Montreal), isn't the wedding industry. And the printing industry is about as cutthroat and cost-competitive as they come.
I always get strange looks when I tell people that Chuck's Color Theory class was one of the best Art classes I took in college. I mean it, too.
It's telling that you had to teach yourself HTML/CSS. The Art department is still of little help in that regard. They're still teaching tables for layout. cringe
Anyways, good luck. I'm happily employed, so I can't offer myself up as a co-founder.
I actually went back there a year and a half ago to try to teach a lesson on correct HTML/CSS - and failed miserably. My public speaking skills were awful, I was stuck in the computer room (so everyone was surfing rather than listening), and I wasn't promoted - it was awful. I hate that Enrica still teaches Dreamweaver as the correct way to markup websites.
Thanks for the luck. <3
As are everyone's first time they lecture. At least from my experience, second time is a ton easier/better.
Although the real money is in high-dollar custom letterpress wedding announcements, there may be some money toward the lower end of the pricing spectrum.
"A do-it-yourself wedding invitation kit costs $45, while professional wedding invitations are hundreds or thousands of dollars."
How much of that "hundreds or thousands" is in the actual printing vs. the design + margin?
Quality printing doesn't scale down (the cost is making the plate).
There's a lot of potential there. Building a really good and slick UI to handle different layouts and customization is not easy and would be a fun challenge for a solid JavaScript programmer.
Unless of course you go the Flash route. But this thing could demo really really well on an iPad.
Definitely the printing part is important. We printed everything ourselves and it was a lot of work and only possible because she knows our printer inside out. Making this easy is primordial, I think.
Most people want to see samples of the different colors before they choose. This is also important because it never looks as it does on the screen.
I'm also working on a wedding application. I just dropped you an email. Hope to hear from you!
Regards,
Alex