I am often asked “how many invitations should I order?” Well, it depends, but you don’t want to order too many and have them left over. That’s expensive because you pay for every invitation and you shouldn’t order invitations you don’t need. You also don’t want to order too few and have to order more. That can be expensive, too, especially if the printer or designer has a set-up fee or minimum order requirement.
It is a good idea to spend some time before your place your invitation order to make sure you have an accurate number. It’s okay to have a few extra invitations in case you realize you forgot to include someone, but there’s no need to order more than 5 or 10 extras.
The most important thing you want to remember when determining how many invitations to order is that you need to order one invitation set per address, not one per person. This is a very common mistake that people make. For example, if you are having a party and 150 are on your list, you will need fewer invitations because some invitations will be addressed to couples or families who reside at the same address.
I had a client recently who told me she needed 150 invitations, but when she sent me her list, there were only 75 addresses on it. I counted the number of people and sure enough, there were close to 150 on the list. But she didn’t need to order an invitation for each guest.
I’m sure she loves the invitations. They are beautiful and are exactly what she wanted, but unfortunately, she has to pay for the extra invitations. She could have avoided this costly mistake by taking more time to go through her list before placing her order.