The days when the parents of the bride or groom visit your home to personally give you their child’s wedding card and sweets may be numbered.
Increasingly, guests are being invited with even more fanfare. At the sound of trumpets, vibrant flowers spring out in the background. Butterflies, peacocks and elephants join the grand proclamation. A tiny Ganesha appears. The bride and groom, flaunting their traditional Sabyasachi outfits, follow. “Save The Date,” the card on your phone reads.
No one size fits all
Shaadi ek hi baar hoti hain (We get married only once), as the popular dialogue from a popular Hindi film goes.
The marriage season in India is a festival in itself. Some like their wedding to be simple with close relatives and subtle functions. Others like it to be a massive celebration. It is the wedding invites that give the invitees an inkling of what kind of a wedding to expect.
Wedding invites are the official get-set-go points for weddings. Over the years, wedding cards have changed shape, size and form. Today, there are mainly two kinds of wedding invites: physical cards and e-invites.
To be sure, wedding cards for the big opulent Indian wedding aren't going away in a rush but there is an equal pull in the opposite direction, where some couples are choosing paperless invites for reasons ranging from eco-friendliness to pocket-friendliness and immersive cards that tell a story. Plus, intimate gatherings of 50-100 people or so for weddings are a pandemic-time trend that has come to stay - and smaller guest lists mean fewer invites.
War of the mediums
There is no doubt that the e-invites industry is gobbling up a large base of the physical cards industry. Yet physical cards industry refuses to die down. No, not in India, it seems to say - and with good reason.
For one, wedding cards are still seen as documentation - for example, when you apply for a visa to attend an overseas wedding.
Another reason, of course, is tradition - though India is a mobile-first country, a physical invitation is still considered more polite and/or respectful in some instances.
What has eroded lately, though, is their aspirational value - cards that cost hundreds, even thousands of rupees, end up in garbage bags and landfills post the event. Plus, as technology becomes better every day, digital cards offer options to make the invites multi-media, even interactive.
Paper tigers
Rachna Card Collection, in Mumbai’s wedding card market CP Tank, has seen order sizes shrink in the last seven years. “There was a time when this business was booming. WhatsApp didn’t exist then,” says Jinesh Jain, 27, one of the heads of the family-owned business. “A thousand invitations for one wedding were very common. Today, we count it as bulk. But at that time, that was the quantity for retail.”
Every next shop in Khadilkar Road in CP Tank deals in wedding invitation cards. However, most have now started to branch out into other paper-related products like boxes and envelopes.
“I have five to six orders (of wedding cards) currently,” Jain adds. “The average quantity of each order is 50 cards. That is 250-300 cards in total. If you compare it with seven years ago, the same five to six orders would sum up to five to six thousand cards.”
Rachana Card Collection was founded by Jain’s grandfather in 1995. It manufactures and resells wedding cards, making it both a retailer and a wholesaler. An exporter of wedding cards, Rachana Card Collection not only sells in India but also in 23 other countries. Jain, who joined in 2018, took over a year to learn the nitty-gritties of running this business. He started with the manufacturing process. That was when he saw the first stumbling block of this industry.
“In manufacturing, there are wastages that happen at every stage,” he says. One card goes through at least three to four manufacturing processes, the key ones being cutting, screen printing, foiling, embossing and punching. Once a design is screen printed on the cut sheet of paper, the foiling must be accurately pasted on the design wherever required. If it misses the spot, the card goes to waste. The same precision is required in the other steps. “If I have to manufacture 1,000 cards, I will have to put 1,050 into manufacturing because 50 will surely go to waste.”
Printing a specific quantity of cards, generally 1,000, in a specific colour and design, takes around five to seven days. However, the work starts months before the printing process even begins. Over four months are spent just on finalising the designs before the wedding season begins in August. The decisions are based on the sales and demand of cards from the previous year.
Manufacturers also tour around India to understand the taste of people from different corners of the country. “For instance,” Jain explains, “in South India, people prefer simple and elegant cards which are generally white in colour, whereas people in Kolkata prefer red or maroon coloured cards.” The preferred designs also change with change in geographies. All of this is taken stock of in the four months of finalising designs.
Once printed, wastage of designs is another drawback that this industry faces. “If a design doesn’t sell in the wedding season, the cards (of that design) ultimately go as a loss. If there are a hundred designs, there will be around 15-20 designs which won’t click in the entire year. And then there are around 15,000-20,000 cards that are just sitting there. You have to sell them at a very cheap price so that you recover at least 60-70 percent of the cost of production.”
It is because these cards are designed and printed before the wedding season begins that customisation is not possible for any quantity below 500 cards. He adds, “The cost of production rises by 50 percent if it is below anything below 500.”
Bespoke invites
E-invites, on the other hand, are completely customised products. Couples demand that their wedding decoration be reflected in their wedding invite. Some even ask for the outfits of their caricatures to look like the outfits they will be wearing on a specific occasion.
“This is the kind of flexibility that e-invites have and is missing in physical cards,” explains Vidisha Agarwal 29. Founder of Tar Invitations, Agarwal and team entered the wedding market in 2020.
Tar Invitations deals in e-invites for various occasions. The two basic types of e-invites come in the form of pdfs and videos. “We draw every tiny detail digitally. For example, if you say you have a Moroccan theme Haldi function, we will draw the same kind of Moroccan pot in the e-invite that you will have in the function.”
Tar Invites also makes Chat Style Invites for weddings in India. This kind of invite allows the invitees to get into a computed conversation with the inviters. The invitees immediately feel involved in the wedding as the conversation builds up. This further helps in recording RSVPs and guest details.
Coming from a Marwari background, Agarwal says she always knew that the wedding market will never die in India. “People in India are crazy about two things: weddings and babies. And a wedding is such an occasion, small or big, people are always involved. It is recession-proof. Kuch bhi hojaay, shaadi zarur hoti hain!”
The level of excitement for a wedding reflects in the kind of cards you send. “In India, weddings are all about how much you can show off,” says Agarwal. “People feel that the invite they send makes a first-impression on their guests. But, also, after the wedding ends, the decoration and the outfits may not be there forever. And when you look at the video (e-invite), you remember how it was on the day.”
Cost factor
It takes around four to 25 days to make an e-invite, depending on the format (pdf or video) and the kind of elements in the invite. Tar Invites prices its e-invites between Rs 5,000- 10,000 (for videos). Adding caricatures and logos would mean an additional cost.
Jain, at Rachana Card Collection, prices his physical cards in the range of Rs 7- 100 per piece, depending on the quality of the card and the manufacturing processes involved.
The rate of premium invites at Tar Invites can go up to Rs 25,000. Premium cards at Rachana Card Collection, on the other hand, can cost anywhere between Rs 100-250 per piece.
“The cost of e-invite remains the same, even if I have to send it to a thousand people,” says Agarwal. “But the cost, in the case of physical cards, goes up if I have a thousand invites.”
She further points out that e-invites are more convenient because all that has to be done is send the invite on WhatsApp to the invitees. It saves the very busy bride and groom the time of going to their relatives’ homes to distribute the physical copies of invites. “If I am going to somebody’s place (to give the card), I will also at least have to carry a box of sweets, which is again an additional cost for me. Everyone wants to have a good wedding but within a budget.”
WhatsApp gave birth to e-invites across the globe. “We have had e-invites for the past seven to eight years,” says Agarwal. The pandemic, however, was the one that gave everyone the excuse to make a complete shift from physical cards to e-invites. “It is like how we got comfortable with working from home. At first, everyone was hesitant about the online format of working. But now, everyone wants to work from home. It saves them time.”
To be sure, some people still have some reservations about making the switch. “In the southern states, like Kerala and Tamil Nadu, people are not so much into westernising and digitising. They want to follow the culture,” explains Jain. “The minimum quantity of physical cards over there is still 300-400 cards.”
Hybrid patch
“Earlier, when we used to give cards by going to our relatives’ homes, it was done out of love,” Shilpa Katarya from Mumbai, whose eldest son got married in December last year, recalls. “Now, with e-invites, it feels like a formality. But the relations in this generation are also like that. Everyone is busy with their own thing.”
Katarya, like almost every Indian, opted for both e-invites and physical cards. “We print at least 11 cards to give in the temples. This is done to invite the gods to our child’s marriage. We have to give them physical cards because, unfortunately, gods don’t have WhatsApp,” she says as she laughs at the idea.
Even though the North Indians are more inclined towards e-invites, they are not beyond the Indian culture. They have to print a minimum of 11-21 cards which are to be distributed in the temples and among close relatives.
“Today, a wedding costs between Rs 7- 10 lakh at least. If you distribute a thousand (physical) cards, it will cost you around Rs 30,000-40,000. That is barely 3-4 percent of your total expense,” says Jain, writing off the belief that people save by opting for e-invites. “The problem is that people don’t want to invest time in physically going and distributing the invitations.”
“If a person has basic knowledge in Photoshop, they can also start making e-invites,” Jain adds. He opines that by supporting the e-invite industry, employment is severely impacted. Apart from his in-house team of designers and employees to look after the manufacturing process, Jain outsources work to many other designers and fine workers to meet the requirements of making physical wedding cards.
“There are many processes to manufacturing a card. It is not practically possible for me, as a manufacturer, to have all the required machines or processes under the same roof. There will be someone else who does only screen printing or foiling. And they have been doing just that for cards for years to make a living. They get business because we get orders.”
Jain further argues that because of the massive competition and ease of getting into the e-invite industry, it can never entirely be the only source of making a living. “As a person who is running a business and has employees under them, it will never be feasible for me. This is because it will never give me the kind of income to feed my employees’ families along with mine.”
And even though Jain is fighting to save the industry, unlike many others, he knows that he may not be able to do much. He has already started to branch into other printing-related products like boxes and business cards. “In a few years, this (physical wedding invites) will be a business that contributes the least to earning a living. By that time, we will completely be into printing.”
Hardly anyone, despite the recent pandemic, has made a complete shift from physical cards to e-invites in India. Industry veterans believe that if the industry were to ever completely die, it will take at least seven to eight more years before physical cards go out of existence. Be it culture, religion or tradition, although not as dominant, physical cards will probably continue to coexist with e-invites for a long time in India.
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