Paperless Post Preview

Sorry I've been a bit absent on the blog front lately. T-minus six days until I fly to the U.S. for the summer of wedding-palooza and the past two weeks have been full of pre-trans-pacific events. Some of which included tying up loose ends with my job, seeing friends for the last time as a single lady, and... buying a house - if you can call a gutted 1910's villa wth no kitchen and bathroom a house (yay!). And of course there has been heaps going on in wedding world as well. Some stressful, some fun.

One of the fun things has been the chance to test-drive Paperless Post, the medium through which we've decided to send our e-invitations. I wanted to play around with it and make sure it really worked before committing to it fully. I also wanted to send our moms something nice to invite them to be our officiants. Skype or email seemed to casual for such an important request, but snail mail was not an option since it would take over 2 weeks to arrive. Not sure whether the timing of it all was a factor there so much as my lack of patience.

Anyhow, I played and played for hours on the PP site and this is what I came up with for the moms.

Envelope Liner. Of course.

Front Side. Featuring the beautiful MIL Veggie and Mamma Veggie with us wee veggies.

Back Side.

Overall I was super pumped about the design I came up with. But, there were a few bumps in the design process. First is the fact that the PP site takes ages to load. Broadband hasn't hit our part of the world yet, so I realize our connection is slower than most, but there must be a better way to run this site for faster loading. Also, despite the insane amounts of options when it comes to envelope liners, I was disappointed by the limited amount of fonts available. I love me a good font. They offer about 20 total, not nearly enough for me. But, having said that, I have come up with a creative way to usurp this font blockade for our actual wedding invitations (oooh... a cliffhanger).

I sent off the officiant invites to the two moms with high hopes and heard back from Mamma Veggie within two days. She loved it. Of course she would be our officiant. Hooray. After 3 days I still hadn't head from MIL Veggie, so I sent her an email asking her what was up. Turns out she never received it. PP has some good systems set up for this kind of snafu, where you can track which invites were undeliverable, which ones got delivered but not opened, etc. It even resends unopened invited automatically every three days. But somehow, even though it was showing up as "delivered" it wasn't showing up in MIL Veggie's inbox. Lost in the mail? Not sure what was happening there.

I got another chance to preview PP a few days later when I got this in my inbox:



I was a bit overwhelmed. It was very sweet that my sisters and mom were throwing me a shower, and I felt loved just for that. But what really got me was the fact that they were trying to be as eco as possible while doing it. Not because its what they wanted, but because they knew it was what I would want. They used PP invites instead of paper, which showed huge restraint for Veggie Sis Kale who loves paper products. They also carefully worded an email to those who asked about gifts. This email was such a nice added extra touch because it showed us their appreciation and understanding of what we want our wedding to be about. In the email they wrote about our ethos as a couple, our budding non-profit, our feelings that gifts were unnecessary, and our need to transport any gifts many thousands of miles. They encouraged guests to keep those things in mind as they thought about gifts.

Which brings me to my next post. Gift registry. Or the lack there of.