Invitations
Weddings, Golden Anniversaries, Retirement parties, Bar Mitzvahs and other similar events can carry huge significance for individuals and families. Every detail becomes important and the invitations are often the first thing that the guests get to see.
Formal Invitations are big business and can be very expensive. Bear in mind that they are essentially just good quality paper and printing along with some appropriate design features, which ought to make the profit margins attractive.
If you are not a designer, or design oriented then you will need to either find a printer who can take on this part of the job, or a partner who is willing to work with you. Be flexible and adapt your ideas to what clients want, or allow them to design their own invitations if that’s what they want.
Outsource your printing to a developing country such as China or South America and make run some test jobs before you start in business to test their accuracy. Chinese printers in particular can be very poor at getting English letters in the correct order as they are not used to our writing system.
Given the printing and delivery time you should have different prices for different timeframes, e.g. your flat rate could be at 6 weeks delivery time, and rush jobs at 3-4 days but with a big differential in price as you would have to use couriers in the rush job scenario.
In terms of marketing your invitations there are a number of ways to go about this; you can start with the following: -
Yellow Pages
Ebay
Website
Wedding planners/Party planners
Annual Events
Charities
I would start with Yellow Pages for two reasons; Ebay and Websites in general for this business are very competitive, and Yellow Pages will bring you local customers who you can meet; demonstrate your enthusiasm and stress your flexibility. Its also not going to bring you lots of orders at the same time, and thus gives you time to build some experience at a steady pace.
Ebay has over 3400 results on a search for invitations, and if you narrow this to “wedding invitations” it is still over 700. In short this is competitive, but you can still pick up business if you are smart, there are for example only 6 results for “bar mitzvah invitations” and 2 results for retirement invitations. If you link these back to your website then customers may bookmark your site and come back for other events, pass your url on to friends etc.
Building a website is cost effective and allows people to see your stock. With over 32 million results for “invitations” on Google you are unlikely to get to the top of the Search engine rankings although if you have deep pockets it is possible to buy the top spots from Google. What you can do is promote your website through your other activities and use it as a kind of customer service tool/catalogue.
Wedding and party planners tend to cater to the more lavish parties with larger budgets; they also tend to be creative people and will appreciate a degree of flexibility in design and materials used in the invitations. You can find them listed in the Yellow pages and online too, and should make a few phone calls, buy a few coffees etc. to work out how you could best work together.
Most large cities have an events calendar, which shows well in advance what is going on both culturally and on the party scene for the larger, more formal, and usually annual events. If you have a copy of this calendar (hint look on line for your city and search on “City name events calendar”) then you have a start point and can begin trying to find out who is planning each event, and whether they have found anyone to work with on the invitations yet.
All of the larger charities hold fund raising dinners and other events on a regular basis to ensure that they stay at the forefront of their big donors’ minds and also as a way to bring in additional cash from those that don’t normally give but want to hear some other big name speaker or sit at the same table as a major sports personality. If you have the front to make them pay and they do not have a donor invitation company then this can be very profitable, and contrary to popular belief charities do have to pay for some goods and services….that’s what they need our money for! If you do feel that you ought to donate then make sure that you get a credit in the program, and a thank you from one of the speakers as this effectively becomes advertising and can be very effective given the audience.
www.alibaba.com has over 2000 suppliers of invitations, and the first 2 or 3 all say that your designs are welcome.
If quality is your primary concern then you may wish to source from a local printing firm, or even somewhere like Italy or Switzerland that just has an aura of both quality and romance. Make sure that you can charge enough to cover this kind of expense and factor in the shipping charges.
Using a combination of local and overseas suppliers may be the answer with local firms being used for rush jobs, which can be priced higher anyway.
Proof everything yourself, and proof it again 24 hours later
Leave enough time to fix mistakes and insist that the buyer signs off on the design before you commit to the full print run.