Customized Invitations and Announcements – Endless Options from BasicInvite.com

This post is brought to you by BasicInvite.com, but all writing and opinions are my own.

When my kids were born, I printed out their baby announcements on special vellum paper, attaching it to card stock with ribbon and then sending them out to friends and family. This was not a good project for a new mom. It was time consuming and required my husband bringing home his office cutting device, standing over the printer feeding in the vellum, and then ordering new ink when I ran out. In decade-plus that’s passed since then, there are so many better options for designing and ordering beautiful announcements online, at a very reasonable cost.

We get our photo holiday cards online. We get customized thank you notes online. We’ve gotten birthday invitations online.

So when it was time to order my son’s bar mitzvah invitations, did I call to an invitation person?

Go to the brick and mortar stationery store? Nope. I went online.

I scoured a dozen sites before selecting the company we used, but I wish I knew about BasicInvite.com when I was looking. Of course they have beautiful and modern designs, that’s a given. But they offer 180 different color options so you can get just the right shade of green or purple, or whatever color you desire. The company we went with (as well as other companies I looked at) only offered a handful of ink and design colors. We were going back and forth between two color combinations, having a hard time deciding, since we wanted to tweak them to the exact shade we preferred. Basic Invite lets you do that, and you can see the instant preview result on screen when you make your selection.

When we finalized our invitation with the other company, we kept our fingers crossed that it would look as good on paper as it did on the screen. We had previously gotten a paper sample from the company, but it wasn’t for the same invitation design. Basic Invite is one of the few websites that give customers the ability to order a printed sample of the actual invitation customized with your information, so you can have a copy of the real thing, before placing the final order. That would have been nice, as I held my breath when opening our invitation box, fearful there would be a mistake, the color would be off, or I wouldn’t like the paper quality.

The other unique thing about Basic Invite is that they offer more than 40 envelope colors. That may not seem like a big deal now. But when you’ve spent time picking out the perfect invitation and you then realize that the company you chose offers only white or tan envelopes (which ours did), it can be disappointing. In our case, neither color perfectly matched the color scheme on our invitation. With Basic Invite, that’s not an issue. The envelope color is part of the whole feel of the invitation and makes an impression before the invited guest even opens it. The envelopes are also peel and stick, so you don’t have to lick them (my daughter hates doing this) or worry about the envelope opening during the mailing process. They seal securely.

The company’s invitations run the gamut from baby shower invitations to bridal showers, from first birthday parties to graduations. They can print and design nearly everything you could want for a wedding, including save-the-date cards, invitations, direction cards, other enclosure cards, reply cards, menu cards, programs cards, thank you cards and guest books.

Choose from simple or fancy. Gold foil or silver foil (or no foil). Pocket invitations. Invitations printed on wood (really). Cards with photos. Cards with fancy font. Cards with simple font. All styles of invitations (but not boring ones). Designs on the back. There are many, many options.

I love stationery, and choosing invitations and holiday card styles keeps me busy for hours (whereas my husband can make his choice in minutes). When you’re in the market for invitations or announcements, check out Basic Invite. And look at their free printables too!