Here’s my theory: every bride has one favorite aspect of wedding planning; one part she’s straight-up dreading; and one part that she’s just kinda ‘meh’ about. It’s my version of ‘something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue’.
The favorite part? The part she’s been looking forward to since she was a little girl with a pillow-slip hanging off the back of her head? Well, it’s often the dress, but it varies from bride to bride. But when my best friend Caitlin asked me to be her maid of honor – that’s Caitlin who used to borrow all my best pens in high school; Caitlin who has a huge stack of pristine notebooks in her closet and still buys more every time Target has a sale; Caitlin whose idea of a great girls’ day is shopping for school supplies followed by an evening of scrapbooking – I knew right away what was going to be her favorite part. That’s right: choosing the wedding stationery.
Wedding stationery is a great way to express your personality and the theme of your wedding: the color scheme, the choice of paper, the font! And invitations are particularly important, because they’re your first chance to set the tone of your wedding for most of your guests.
So when Caitlin told me that my first task as maid of honor was to help her select the perfect invitations, I knew it was a huge responsibility: but I already had a stack of research material and inspiration ready to go, thanks to the avalanche of invitations I’d already received for next year’s weddings.
I laid them all out to look at and straight away I noticed a pattern: everyone is choosing wedding invitations with palm trees right now! Whether you’re having a destination wedding in a tropical location, evoking summery vibes, or just nailing your colors to the mast as a proud and on-trend millennial, a palm tree print is the look you’re looking for.
Right away I knew this was the perfect look for Caitlin’s wedding next summer, and not just because she’s opting for a beach wedding: Caity is such a millennial cliché that it’s a running joke between her and her fiancé Turner. Everything in her apartment is either millennial pink, marble-patterned or brass-accented (or some combination of all three!) and she literally owns a neon ‘good vibes only’ sign. I could see ‘Caitlin & Turner 2019’ on that palm tree print background in my mind’s eye, and I loved it.
But would Caitlin love it? Here’s the thing: we were, like, a week into wedding planning and already she was starting to exhibit just a teensy bit of…dare I say it…Bridezilla attitude? First she shut down her sister’s cake suggestion because “that’s what you had at your wedding”. Then she started getting stressed because none of the venues we looked at were “unique enough”. At one point she even got it into her cute head that she wanted to get married on a stretch of beach where no other couple had ever got married before. Sure, she calmed down and realized she was being nuts. But one thing was clear – this bride wanted her wedding to stand out. So were these palm print wedding invitations going to be too on-trend?
I stopped worrying the second I found basicinvite.com. Do they do wedding invitations with palm trees? Sure! But what’s even better is that they offer invitations in about a zillion colors. I’m hardly even exaggerating. Once you select a design you can change the color of every single element of the card to over 180 different color options. They even have a huge range of peel and seal envelopes, with more than 40 envelope colors to choose from. It was the perfect solution: Caitlin could select that palm tree invitation design that was totally on trend, then customize it with her favorite colors (did someone say ‘millennial pink??’) to make it completely unique to her, right down to the tiniest detail.
Caitlin was totally on board, except for one thing: did I mention how much she loves browsing in stationery stores? Well, she does – so I was a little worried that she’d be bummed out by the thought of ordering her stationery online, without getting her hands on it first. But I needn’t have worried: not only did she have great fun selecting colors (and boy, did she spend a long time choosing the perfect shade!), but Basic Invite is one of the few websites that allow customers to order a printed sample of their actual invitation before they buy. We got to see exactly how the invitations would print and to feel the paper quality ahead of time. What’s more, each invitation is part of a matching set – Basic Invite have over 900 of them – which includes save the date cards, menus, programs and even thank-you cards. They also offer an address collection service and Seal & Send invitations which take a ton of the hassle out of the wedding invitation process.
I was starting to think I had this maid of honor gig sewn up, until – when we were putting together our final draft of the invitations – Caitlin reminded me that we still needed a wedding website. Aargh! Where was I going to get a website at this short notice? I was racking my brains trying to remember the names of all those website companies they advertise in the middle of podcasts when I realized – Basic Invite now have that covered too!
Just like the invitations, their wedding websites are completely customisable: there are 180 custom colors to choose from, and you can coordinate the site with your stationery. I was relieved to discover that creating the site is super-easy: you can instantly upload all the wedding details, plus images, and a map to help your guests find the venue – and the websites are mobile-friendly, so we knew that even Caitlin’s most disorganized guests would be able to find all the details they needed at the last minute.
To get the palm print wedding invitations of your – or your best friend’s – millennial dreams, head to basicinvite.com. Happy wedding planning!
