Mailing Wedding Invitations: How-to Guide

Wedding invitations and suites can be truly beautiful -- as they should be! They set the tone for your event and beguile your guests into coming to celebrate with you. After falling in love with a design, carefully crafting the wording, and potentially paying a good bit of money for your invites, the last thing you want is for them to get damaged in the mail.

Unfortunately, there is always a risk of scuffing and smudging when you send them through the post office. Here are a few steps you can take to help ensure safety when mailing wedding invitations to your guests.

Explore 3 steps to help you with mailing wedding invitations safely:

1. Use wedding invitation tissue.

Ever opened up a wedding invitation to find a piece of tissue paper or vellum covering the actual invite? That wasn’t included just for decoration. These delicate, translucent pieces of paper actually serve as a protective layer between the invitation and the envelope to help prevent smudging. While not effective against stronger forces like a post office cancelling machine, it always helps to have an extra protective barrier enclosed in the envelope. The bright side of these add-ons is that beyond serving a practical purpose, they can also add an element of interest to your invitation -- particularly if you choose a colored piece of tissue or vellum.

2. Get your wedding invitations hand cancelled.

Asking the post office to have your invites “hand cancelled” is a great way to reduce wear and tear on your invites. When you send any piece of mail, the post office usually runs the invitations through a machine that “cancels” the postage stamp so it can’t be reused. This machine can damage any delicate or three dimensional elements, smudge ink, and even rip the invite. When you ask for your invitations to be hand cancelled, this means that someone cancels the postage stamp by hand and never runs the invites through a machine. This service comes at no extra charge. You simply need to ask for it.

3. Hand-deliver as many as possible.

One of the best ways to ensure that your guests receive invitations that look exactly the way you intended is to hand-deliver them. Aside from keeping your invites looking pristine, you also get the added bonus of personalizing your invite even more and saving money on postage. It also takes away the possibility that your invites will get lost in the mail. This can obviously be challenging if most of your guests live far away, but hand delivering as many as possible still comes with benefits.

UP NEXT: Explore ways to save money on wedding invitations.