Getting Married in Korea Pt.5 (invitations)

I googled and found a great blog about Korean wedding planning, Angie in the City, which you've probably already seen if you've found your way here.  Anyway, I perused all the suggested invitation sites she suggested and ended up at Barunson Cards and then proceeded to look at all the links at the top of that page.  The invitations that the above blogger had purchased were no longer available, but I was searching for a similar style postcard.

Eventually I found a couple on Premier Paper that fit the bill.  I ordered samples and then just had to decide between two, Holy White and Harmony.  I'm glad I got the samples because the quality looks similar on the website, but in person, the Holy White style was definitely a higher quality paper.  The Harmony style, while I liked the blue ribbon better, was a thinner card, and the edges were not glossy.  The Holy White ribbon was also a lot nicer.



I'm not great at Korean, but I was able to stumble my way through the website to make an ID and order the invitations myself.  The problem came when it was time to enter in the information.  These kinds of websites are very good and making the standard Korean wedding invitation with very specific details (usually bride and groom's names, a love quote of sorts, parent's names, date/time/place) all in Korean.  However, we wanted to have a mix of both Korean and English.  So, basically I submitted the details as best I could and the sample (which they posted on the website about a day later) came out looking awful, like all kinds of random.  After the first draft is posted, you can submit attachments.  I typed up the basic format I wanted in Word and attached it to my next request.  The "designer" directly copy and pasted what I had done onto the new draft, without changing fonts or sizes.  It took about 5 more drafts between both me and husband to get our final product.  I decided to omit the love quote as well as parent's names (it still said "Together with our parents" at the top) in order to save space.

Once we submitted the final draft and sent it to printing, we got them all in the mail in about a week.  The minimum number we were able to order was 100, even though we realistically probably only needed 50-70.  They cost 114,000 for 100, including cards, envelopes and stickers.  When the invitations arrived, the ribbons were wrong.  They were the same style as the blue Harmony ribbon but in white.  SH called the company and they said they had made a mistake so we exchanged those and they sent the right ones within a couple of days.  After that, we started handing them out.  I thought everything was fine until we sent a bunch to PIL and BIL to give out to the relatives.  We had put our address on the envelope as the return address.  PIL and BIL wanted to have husband's parent's names and address instead since I had decided not to put parents names on the invitation.  We paid for our wedding ourselves, so I thought this was fine.  I honestly couldn't understand what the big deal was, and still don't really, but whatever..chalk it up to another cultural difference.  We ended up ordering 50 (that was the minimum- for 25,000 won) more envelopes with PIL address printed on them which took probably another week to get all sorted.