Save the Date: Take 2

Every bride's worse nightmare has struck. What's this nightmare? The US Postal Service.

When you send your carefully designed and crafted message out into the world, you hope it arrives close to what it looked like when you dropped it in the mail box. We quickly heard from guests that some postcards had stickers added to the bottom. The stickers blocked the website information. This we were able to handle pretty easily as guests contacted us for more info. We'd naively thought that would be the only problem with the save the dates. We were wrong.

Once we started giving our out-of-town guests updates on hotel accommodations, we were met with some surprise. Not everyone had received a Save the Date postcard.

Yesterday we rectified this by creating an electronic Save the Date and sending that version to all of our guests.

Did all of your guests get their Save the Dates? Did you resend print invitations or did you send electronic Save the Dates the second time?

Oops! DIY Fail: Save the Dates

One would think that being in Marketing and having designed direct mail pieces that I'd be a pro at Save the Dates. Nope.

What's the fail you ask? Well after so carefully hand addressing all of our Save the Dates,  we discovered the addresses are too big for us to add postage stamps.

I think when it comes to weddings, every bride is a rookie regardless of her professional expertise. When I ordered the stamps for our stationery it never entered my mind to doublecheck the size of the stamp. As I waited for the stamps to arrive, I merrily addressed Save the Dates, carefully avoiding the neatly marked square on the postcard.

ProTip: Before beginning to address Save the Dates, Invitations, Thank You Cards, etc. position the postage and verify the amount of space you have available. Hint. There's probably less room than you think.

And guess what discovered when I open the stamps? Yep... The stamps aren't the traditional postage size that's marked out on the postcard. Ooops...

Luckily I had printed extra Save the Dates (108). So with 8 addressing mistakes and 17 stamp mishaps, we only need to print an additional 5! And, we have plenty of paper and fresh ink. Whew... Potential emergency avoided.

Did you mis-size your postage? What did you do?