The Honor of Your Postage Is Requested

HUNGRY for revenue, the United States Postal Service is out for its own slice of the American wedding business. Figuring that a majority of couples are still choosing traditional printed invitations for their weddings, rather than “e-vites” and other Web communications tools, the Postal Service has been issuing stamps featuring cakes, flowers, gold bands and other wedding themes.

“One of the many strategies to help turn the Post Office around is to continue to energize the wedding industry to keep putting those invitations in the mail,” said Stephen M. Kearney, who works in Washington as the executive director of stamp services, a Postal Services division that accounts for 25 percent of its total annual revenue of $60 billion. “And since wedding stamps are the king of stamps designed for a specific use, it makes sense to keep putting out different ones for people to choose from.”

With 2.4 million weddings a year in the United States and $165 billion spent on them, according to the Association of Bridal Consultants, “thoughtfully worded” wedding invitations “printed on expensive heavy paper stock” are still the norm for most couples, the stamp designer Ethel Kessler said.

Ms. Kessler, an art director based in Bethesda, Md., who has designed about 300 stamps for the Postal Service in the last 15 years, including the five wedding stamps that have been issued since 2006, also noted that the need for postage multiplies “when you factor in invitations for wedding showers, reply cards and thank-you cards.”

Neither Ms. Kessler nor Mr. Kearney deny that the building tide of e-mail, text messaging and other types of social networking, including Skype, has brought a serious decline in stamp production and the revenues generated by them. Among the findings in the 2011 American Wedding Study issued by Brides magazine was that one in five couples are summoning their guests with e-mail or e-vites, which are thought by some to be more efficient, economical and environmentally sound.

But some see a downside to e-vites.

“They can become cumbersome,” said Peggy Post, a director of the Emily Post Institute in Burlington, Vt. “In some cases, people might not have the right e-mail address to send out an invitation, and even if they do, the invitation can get lost in someone’s junk mail.”

Ms. Post, who also writes the online Well-Mannered Wedding column for The New York Times, said that etiquette does not dictate that invitations must be printed and mailed. “Most couples still prefer sending out printed invitations through the mail because it signifies a big moment in their lives,” she said. “It’s another way of adding one more wow factor to the wedding, a sort of frosting on the cake that the couple worked so hard to bake.”

Which may be why last month the Postal Service began selling a 65-cent stamp depicting a frothy wedding cake — a reissued and repriced version of the 61-cent stamp it introduced in 2009, generating $76 million in sales over a two-year period.

The Postal Service’s first wedding stamp, depicting a calligraphic dove-and-heart design, posted $375 million in sales. A heart-within-a-heart design, introduced in 2007, saw sales of $446 million over two years.

Another 2009 issue that featured a pair of gold wedding rings piled on another $125 million. And last year’s wedding roses stamp rang up $47 million over eight months.

The Postal Service has also authorized companies like Stamps.com, Zazzle, Endicia and Pitney Bowes/R.R. Donnelly to create their own stamps. Couples can upload their favorite personal photographs (like family portraits, puppies and automobiles) to the Web sites of these companies, which for a fee will turn them into valid postage stamps.

But even the availability of this “puppy postage” has done little to prevent the steady erosion of the Postal Service’s overall stamp revenues, which have declined to $10.3 billion in 2011 from approximately $11.3 billion in 2007.

Ada Marie Foley and Matthew James McCrady of Lawrence Harbor, N.J., who are 29 and plan to wed on July 20 in Ocean Township, N.J., may typify the approach that many young couples are now taking to get the word out. They initially signaled their intentions with a save-the-date video posted on the Web.

Ms. Foley and Mr. McCrady are also preparing to mail wedding invitations in May, complete with personalized postage stamps featuring themselves and Charlotte, their Jack Russell terrier/cocker spaniel mix.

Ms. Foley explained their decision to pair their Web efforts with an old-school formal approach: “Despite the fact that we are living in such a digital age, we still wanted to hold tight to having a formal, paper invitation sent out in the mail. As a bride, there’s something very exciting to me about packing my invitations for mailing. It’s much classier than just sending out an electronic invite, which is not my style.”

Source: NY Times