Is digital invitation a common thing nowadays? Or was it more common even years ago in other countries?
Since a mailed invitation is already considered by many to be the most formal route, it makes sense that electronic invites have gained popularity—especially for those looking to save money (printing fancy invitations and mailing them easily costs hundreds of dollars).
When I got married in 2006, we sent paper invitations with postage-paid RSVP response cards. They were custom-printed by a local printer. Between printing and postage costs, we must have spent over $500 on invitations alone. This was for a very traditional wedding in Michigan.
We're doing digital invites by default and paper invites for family that who would get frustrated trying to use one. Cheaper, better for the environment, most people think it's neat, and it's a fun project.
It’s sad to me that we felt so pressured to do the paper invites. They’re ridiculously overpriced and all of that paper and emissions for delivery for something that can easily be delivered electronically and instantly for near zero cost.
The entire wedding industry thrives on norms like these and it’s amazing to me that technology doesn’t displace more aspects.
Doesn't the entire wedding industry basically revolve around "encouraging" everyone to do a whole bunch of stuff that's either unneccessary, over-complex or simply over-priced?
Paper invites are the least of your worries.
In any case, the CO2 emissions of the invite are negligible compared to other things: say on the night of sending the invitations you have a lamb dinner with your fiance and you each eat 12 oz of lamb, that dinner was responsible for 27 kg of CO2 emissions vs. 120 invitations would be only 3.5 kg.
In turn, that would be far less emissions than feeding everyone 12 oz of lamb (1607 kg of CO2), which would be far less emissions than that produced by the guests arriving (say 7% take transatlantic and 28% take cross-country flights, all economy) - a whopping 73920 kg CO2 [2].
[1] https://90by2030.wordpress.com/2015/12/09/carbon-footprint-l...
[2] BER-NYC roundtrip is 2.4 tons/passenger in economy = 0.07120=20.16 tons + SFO-NYC roundtrip 1.6 tons/passenger in economy = 0.28120*1.6=53.76 tons. Total 73.92 tons.
1 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/01/25...
Also, people love to hang things like invitations on their fridge as a constant reminder of an event that's somewhat far into the future. Rarely is that something printed off of a website, but a card received in the mail will pretty much get placed there straight away (or maybe after sitting on the counter for a period of time).
Someone should invent some kind of electronic mail for these things!
> Also, people love to hang things like invitations on their fridge as a constant reminder of an event that's somewhat far into the future. Rarely is that something printed off of a website, but a card received in the mail will pretty much get placed there straight away (or maybe after sitting on the counter for a period of time).
My wife and I did email invitations because we didn't consider it worth $500 for someone to have something to stick on their fridge. We were able to automatically send an email reminder a week or two ahead of time instead.
What we did was: send out an invitation and it had the date + website (no other info) so people HAD to go on the website to get that information.
I love the idea of the couple inviting everyone in person, I would've loved to do that too. We invited close family and friends so would've been obvious.
So basically a bit of old and a bit of new. It worked well :)
My wife and I sent invitations to friends and family in 6 countries on 3 continents, so inviting everyone in person would have been impractical. We didn't expect eg. her extended family in Chile to actually show up, but we wanted to formally invite them anyway so they would know we were thinking of them.
We did actually have attendees from two continents and four countries though.