After 15 years as the default digital RSVP system for get-togethers large and small, Evite this month added print invitations to its menu. Under the Evite Ink banner, the company is selling 4- x-6” paper versions of 300 of its most popular digital invitations for $2 each. Customers can decide to pay Evite to mail them, or receive them to send out themselves; there’s no minimum order quantity.
According to Evite, the move toward a paper option was inspired by customer demand. “There are people that they still can’t reach through digital means,” Angela Wilson Gyetvan, Evite’s vice president of marketing, told The Associated Press.
What’s far more likely is that Evite has discovered what everyone has always known: there aren’t that many people willing to pay for anything they can’t hold in their hand (music and movies being the exceptions). It’s a discovery made by competitors Paperless Post and Celebrations.com, who have also gone the paper route.
Of course neither of those has anything like Evite’s enormous user base: 32 million registered users sending 28,000 free invitations every hour. If they can get just a fraction of those to kick in $2 here and there, they might be on to something. (A redesign of the invitations themselves wouldn’t go amiss, either…)
