A strategy to enter the lucrative wedding industry is to provide invitations and party items. Entry requirements and necessary hardware are modest. You can start this business with little to no investment and work it in your spare time until it generates enough income to support you full-time.
Count the Money
How much money you make depends on your costs, so it’s important to nail those down first. Let’s start with the preliminary outlay of capital. Among other things, you’ll need access to a high-quality printer, publishing software, paper, and ink. If you want to focus on design and outsource the printing of the cool wedding invites, then you can use the amount you expect to pay the subcontractor as a starting point for your own pricing, and then add a sufficient markup to cover all of your other costs and make a profit. Consider the costs of promotion and advertising, such as producing a sample book to demonstrate your capabilities to potential customers.
Gain in Worth
Find out what makes your company special and how much that distinction is worth to customers. To illustrate, you can charge a fee if you have a background in graphic design and can help engaged couples develop their own unique style and concept for their trifold wedding invitations. That can make you stand out from companies that only offer invitation printing using generic fonts. You can attract more customers and command higher rates if you can offer services that no one else does.
Doing Favors for Others
You need to be able to provide couples with suggestions for party favors, as well as the means to mass create and personalize those goodies as the occasion demands. In order to satisfy a wide range of customers’ wants, you’ll require a sizable pool of reliable providers. Placeholders, picture frames, chocolates, and little bottles of wine are just some of the items that customers may request, and each has a varying degree of effort to acquire and modify to fit customer preferences. Making more money depends on your ability to locate generic products at low costs and add value to them.
Promotion of Oneself
Don’t forget to include in the cost of advertising when calculating your prices. To get into the industry and build up a portfolio of work to present potential clients, you might want to start out by offering your services to close friends and family at cost or below the going rate. Cost-effective marketing options range from trade exhibitions and brick-and-mortar storefronts to online directories and keyword-specific search engine optimization ads. Building rapport with wedding planners will allow them to refer their clients to you for all of their wedding needs.
Make a Game Plan
It’s possible to start a profitable business selling wedding invitations and party goodies while working part-time from home, but you should be ready to ramp up production if demand increases. Think about what will happen if the day-to-day operations become too much for you to handle while you set rates and build your marketing plan. It is possible to free up time by outsourcing non-core business operations to a third party, such as bookkeeping or order processing.
