4 ms·

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

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!

apsurd 16y ago
People really use wedding invitations printed from their home printer? I would think no girl would stand for that =x 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 ?
- towndrunk 16y ago
  I think paper selection is also half the battle. My wife could spend hours on that alone.
  - apsurd 16y ago
    Yeah! That would actually be a better value add if the website integrated preferred paper types/styles/weights with the overall template/theme. Would be nice to have a gallery of previously fulfilled orders to see how the finished product came out. Lot's of choices means a great opportunity for artistic expression ; the website should allow this in a guided manner =) I like that.
- pgbovine 16y ago
  agreed, what makes DIY wedding stationery look gross isn't just the comic-sans-like amateur designs; it's also about printing quality. a home printer is totally unacceptable; even Kinko's might not be that great if you're picky. you will need to find a professional print shop, which could cost almost as much as professionally-printed stationery :(
  - limedaring 16y ago
    One thing I loved about the invitation kits is that they're not that bad — certainly, the paper weight is kind of thin because they have to work with the home printer, but otherwise, you can get a really nice looking and professional invitation out of them if the printer settings are correct. Certainly not anything like super professional heavy weight printed invites, but they work well enough. However, adding Microsoft Word + Curlz + amateur typography would just ruin the whole effect. 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. :)
- wvenable 16y ago
  As a technical person who spent too much on wedding invitations at the last minute, I do think that integration with a printing company would be the killer feature. 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.
  - limedaring 16y ago
    Definitely where I'd like to go, and I'll probably update my blog post to indicate this (took it out just to keep the idea concrete, but I think that was a bad idea). My original tagline was "Moo.com for wedding invitations".
  - frossie 16y ago
    As a technical person who spent too much on wedding invitations at the last minute, I do think that integration with a printing company would be the killer feature. 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.
    - araneae 16y ago
      Picwing might be able to help on advice for this. Their photo quality is AMAZING. Anyone know how they did it?
- limedaring 16y ago
  That's actually where I'd like the idea to go — partner with a printing company like Moo.com and allow for invite creation and printing all from one application. Got to start somewhere, though. 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.
  - joshd 16y ago
    Sounds kind of like http://www.zazzle.com/invitations http://www.zazzle.com/invitations.
    - limedaring 16y ago
      Thanks for linking that, haven't seen it before. I was thinking that this idea could move into general invitations as well but who does that anymore, with FB invites, evite, etc. I think actually sticking to a niche and doing it well will be better than doing general invitations.
      - pku2319 16y ago
        You could also partner with stationary accessory makers (ribbon bows, glitter, small dried flowers, etc.) for further personalization of mass produced DIY kits.
      - chengas123 16y ago
        I hadn't seen http://zazzle.com/wedding+invitations http://zazzle.com/wedding+invitations before either, so now I'm curious how weddingtype.com would be different. It'd be good to think about a couple places where you might be able to differentiate by focusing on this particular niche. E.g the ability to add extras to the card such as ribbon. Also, one thing I didn't like about Zazzle was that I can't order just 1 invitation. I'd be nervous about ordering 200 invitations I'd never seen in person and would want a sample first.
- michaelhans 16y ago
  If you don't want raised lettering I think you could get away with it, if you have the correct starting resources. 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).
- brc 16y ago
  Having been married a while ago, I'm pretty sure we had the invitations done at a local print shop. 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...'
  - arithmetic 16y ago
    I'm getting married in a little over a month and my thoughts resonate a lot with your statement on not spending a lot on the cards. I'm designing the cards on my own (using Gimp, Lightroom and Sketchbook app on iPad - never done this before) and getting it printed locally. I don't think it's worth spending a ton of cash on fancy cards and pricey printing costs.
jing 16y ago
I'm curious - you say, "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?
- kevinpet 16y ago
  Printing is hundreds to over one thousand for normal sane number of invitations. This is for 150x invitation, reply card, envelope, reply envelope. My wife did a barter deal with a printer (did their holiday card and calendar) to get ours printed, and even then they were simple. Quality printing doesn't scale down (the cost is making the plate).
zephjc 16y ago
Tracy, the company I work for, http://pagedna.com http://pagedna.com, might be exactly what you're looking for, and will save you having to develop your own system. Check out the Storefronts section http://pagedna.com/features.php?storefronts http://pagedna.com/features.php?storefronts and the Storefront demo on the Demos page
mgrouchy 16y ago
As someone who is going through the process of getting married(and it is a process!), something like this would be a godsend. I've been searching for technicals solution that could ease some of my wedding troubles(such as cheap, non-crappy hosted wedding website, invitations, etc.).
- apsurd 16y ago
  http://www.weddingjojo.com/ http://www.weddingjojo.com/
brunoc 16y ago
Good luck with this. My girlfriend (less than a month left of me calling her that!) and I are both techies and DIY'ers and went the invitation-kit way. As we were putting it all together we came to the same conclusion you did: there should be a web app for that! 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.
- limedaring 16y ago
  Hsssss Flash. :P Definitely not going to use that. Right now I'm using @font-face for the previews, but I'm sure whoever I partner with will have more ideas.
  - icey 16y ago
    Wigflip's roflbot has my personal favorite implementation of putting text on images. It's very intuitive: http://wigflip.com/roflbot/ http://wigflip.com/roflbot/
guywithabike 16y ago
It's great to see a fellow Cal Poly Art grad on HN! (I graduated 2009, so I probably passed you in the halls, although I don't recognize your name). I imagine you had the pleasure of Chuck's Color Theory class, right? 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.
- guywithabike 16y ago
  To make myself at least somewhat useful: Have you thought about making letterpress invitations significantly cheaper in some way? If you offer only a few templates and paper choices, it's possible to make a decent margin. The initial capital is fairly significant, though. A letterpress and a font or two is not a cheap investment. 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.
  - limedaring 16y ago
    The problem with letterpress is that the plates can't be mass-made — it's a separate letterpress plate per invite, so every invite with different wording would have to have a different plate. It's an interesting idea, though, and an area that definitely needs improvement.
    - yarek 16y ago
      Have you considered using 3d printers to generate the press template on demand?
- limedaring 16y ago
  Yay, Cal Poly! 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
pvg 16y ago
I'm perfectly prepared to eat the 4 points for this but when I read 'disrupt wedding [...]' I was secretly hoping for some sort of technology that enabled more frequent and better photobombing. Maybe in version 2?
- resdirector 16y ago
  Off topic, but FYI "-4" is a lower bound for display purposes. E.g., if you get 40 down-votes, you lose 40 karma...but it will still display as "-4". Can be very harsh, sometimes. I've been self-censoring since learning that.
sr3d 16y ago
Hi Tracy, I'm also working on a wedding application. I just dropped you an email. Hope to hear from you! Regards, Alex
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
jasonlotito 16y ago
You mention disruption in an overpriced wedding industry, and then you mention disruption in the printing industry. Honestly, knowing the printing industry here in Montreal, and knowing the prices they charge for good quality invitations (+ thank you letters, and the RSVP letters and envelops, all matching and embossed of course), anyone doing this at home will spend more money on the material, software, and ink, not to mention time in putting it all together, even if you gave your software away for free. 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.

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!

apsurd 16y ago

People really use wedding invitations printed from their home printer? I would think no girl would stand for that =x 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 ?

towndrunk 16y ago
I think paper selection is also half the battle. My wife could spend hours on that alone.
- apsurd 16y ago
  Yeah! That would actually be a better value add if the website integrated preferred paper types/styles/weights with the overall template/theme. Would be nice to have a gallery of previously fulfilled orders to see how the finished product came out. Lot's of choices means a great opportunity for artistic expression ; the website should allow this in a guided manner =) I like that.
pgbovine 16y ago
agreed, what makes DIY wedding stationery look gross isn't just the comic-sans-like amateur designs; it's also about printing quality. a home printer is totally unacceptable; even Kinko's might not be that great if you're picky. you will need to find a professional print shop, which could cost almost as much as professionally-printed stationery :(
- limedaring 16y ago
  One thing I loved about the invitation kits is that they're not that bad — certainly, the paper weight is kind of thin because they have to work with the home printer, but otherwise, you can get a really nice looking and professional invitation out of them if the printer settings are correct. Certainly not anything like super professional heavy weight printed invites, but they work well enough. However, adding Microsoft Word + Curlz + amateur typography would just ruin the whole effect. 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. :)
wvenable 16y ago
As a technical person who spent too much on wedding invitations at the last minute, I do think that integration with a printing company would be the killer feature. 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.
- limedaring 16y ago
  Definitely where I'd like to go, and I'll probably update my blog post to indicate this (took it out just to keep the idea concrete, but I think that was a bad idea). My original tagline was "Moo.com for wedding invitations".
- frossie 16y ago
  As a technical person who spent too much on wedding invitations at the last minute, I do think that integration with a printing company would be the killer feature. 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.
  - araneae 16y ago
    Picwing might be able to help on advice for this. Their photo quality is AMAZING. Anyone know how they did it?
limedaring 16y ago
That's actually where I'd like the idea to go — partner with a printing company like Moo.com and allow for invite creation and printing all from one application. Got to start somewhere, though. 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.
- joshd 16y ago
  Sounds kind of like http://www.zazzle.com/invitations http://www.zazzle.com/invitations.
  - limedaring 16y ago
    Thanks for linking that, haven't seen it before. I was thinking that this idea could move into general invitations as well but who does that anymore, with FB invites, evite, etc. I think actually sticking to a niche and doing it well will be better than doing general invitations.
    - pku2319 16y ago
      You could also partner with stationary accessory makers (ribbon bows, glitter, small dried flowers, etc.) for further personalization of mass produced DIY kits.
    - chengas123 16y ago
      I hadn't seen http://zazzle.com/wedding+invitations http://zazzle.com/wedding+invitations before either, so now I'm curious how weddingtype.com would be different. It'd be good to think about a couple places where you might be able to differentiate by focusing on this particular niche. E.g the ability to add extras to the card such as ribbon. Also, one thing I didn't like about Zazzle was that I can't order just 1 invitation. I'd be nervous about ordering 200 invitations I'd never seen in person and would want a sample first.
michaelhans 16y ago
If you don't want raised lettering I think you could get away with it, if you have the correct starting resources. 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).
brc 16y ago
Having been married a while ago, I'm pretty sure we had the invitations done at a local print shop. 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...'
- arithmetic 16y ago
  I'm getting married in a little over a month and my thoughts resonate a lot with your statement on not spending a lot on the cards. I'm designing the cards on my own (using Gimp, Lightroom and Sketchbook app on iPad - never done this before) and getting it printed locally. I don't think it's worth spending a ton of cash on fancy cards and pricey printing costs.

jing 16y ago

I'm curious - you say, "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?

kevinpet 16y ago
Printing is hundreds to over one thousand for normal sane number of invitations. This is for 150x invitation, reply card, envelope, reply envelope. My wife did a barter deal with a printer (did their holiday card and calendar) to get ours printed, and even then they were simple. Quality printing doesn't scale down (the cost is making the plate).

zephjc 16y ago

Tracy, the company I work for, http://pagedna.com http://pagedna.com, might be exactly what you're looking for, and will save you having to develop your own system. Check out the Storefronts section http://pagedna.com/features.php?storefronts http://pagedna.com/features.php?storefronts and the Storefront demo on the Demos page

mgrouchy 16y ago

As someone who is going through the process of getting married(and it is a process!), something like this would be a godsend. I've been searching for technicals solution that could ease some of my wedding troubles(such as cheap, non-crappy hosted wedding website, invitations, etc.).

apsurd 16y ago
http://www.weddingjojo.com/ http://www.weddingjojo.com/

brunoc 16y ago

Good luck with this. My girlfriend (less than a month left of me calling her that!) and I are both techies and DIY'ers and went the invitation-kit way. As we were putting it all together we came to the same conclusion you did: there should be a web app for that! 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.

limedaring 16y ago
Hsssss Flash. :P Definitely not going to use that. Right now I'm using @font-face for the previews, but I'm sure whoever I partner with will have more ideas.
- icey 16y ago
  Wigflip's roflbot has my personal favorite implementation of putting text on images. It's very intuitive: http://wigflip.com/roflbot/ http://wigflip.com/roflbot/

guywithabike 16y ago

It's great to see a fellow Cal Poly Art grad on HN! (I graduated 2009, so I probably passed you in the halls, although I don't recognize your name). I imagine you had the pleasure of Chuck's Color Theory class, right? 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.

guywithabike 16y ago
To make myself at least somewhat useful: Have you thought about making letterpress invitations significantly cheaper in some way? If you offer only a few templates and paper choices, it's possible to make a decent margin. The initial capital is fairly significant, though. A letterpress and a font or two is not a cheap investment. 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.
- limedaring 16y ago
  The problem with letterpress is that the plates can't be mass-made — it's a separate letterpress plate per invite, so every invite with different wording would have to have a different plate. It's an interesting idea, though, and an area that definitely needs improvement.
  - yarek 16y ago
    Have you considered using 3d printers to generate the press template on demand?
limedaring 16y ago
Yay, Cal Poly! 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

pvg 16y ago

I'm perfectly prepared to eat the 4 points for this but when I read 'disrupt wedding [...]' I was secretly hoping for some sort of technology that enabled more frequent and better photobombing. Maybe in version 2?

resdirector 16y ago
Off topic, but FYI "-4" is a lower bound for display purposes. E.g., if you get 40 down-votes, you lose 40 karma...but it will still display as "-4". Can be very harsh, sometimes. I've been self-censoring since learning that.

sr3d 16y ago

Hi Tracy, I'm also working on a wedding application. I just dropped you an email. Hope to hear from you! Regards, Alex

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

jasonlotito 16y ago

You mention disruption in an overpriced wedding industry, and then you mention disruption in the printing industry. Honestly, knowing the printing industry here in Montreal, and knowing the prices they charge for good quality invitations (+ thank you letters, and the RSVP letters and envelops, all matching and embossed of course), anyone doing this at home will spend more money on the material, software, and ink, not to mention time in putting it all together, even if you gave your software away for free. 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.