Weddingbee boards

I agree with Sally and Kate. Having some LP experience is key. I also have to say that $50 for a custom wedding invite design is really too low, IMO. Obviously every designer has a different way of calculating how much their work is worth, dependent on their experience and how much they actually want to make in profit, but there's a fine line between budget shopping and then just outright devaluing good creative work. I know there will be people willing to do it for $50, and in some cases you might be lucky and snag an excellent designer, and in some other cases, you'll get what you pay for.

This is not at all a criticism of the OP -- I totally realize you only used prices you currently saw on Alchemy as a guideline for your own estimated costs -- but that's just a criticism of the system in general. As someone who works in the creative field, it just makes me a litle steamed to see other creatives get taken advantage of and propspective clients not really getting that these people do want to earn a living off their work, not just give away good work for pennies an hour! Okay, that's the end of my personal rant =).

In short, your plan is feasible but perhaps not entirely realistic or fair on the design side. If you're going to set your Etsy price at a lower price point for budgetary reasons, take other things into consideration like -- is your design inspiration thorough enough that the designer won't need a lot of extra work or guidance to create the look you want? Doing design revisions can be time consuming, so just be straightforward and exact about the elements you want. A couple rounds of edits is the norm, but once you get into the 10s of rounds, then that's a litle iffy =). Does the designer you want to hire even do similiar work? It'd be best to find someone who actually does stuff very similar to your inspiration, since that means it'll probably take them less time to execute as someone else who needs to build the design from scratch.

I worked with http://www.dickandjaneletterpress.com in St. Paul MN and was totally thrilled with their work and prices. I think you could TOTALLY get your letterpress done there for under your $700 budget. I think they even do custom design (and it should fit within your budget).

I got my invites through Mercurio Bros.  Woo hoo!  I loved them.  They do have some design files available, so you may be able to put something together for not a lot of money working with them.  And they are so nice to work with.   Ask your friends / coworkers if they can help with design.  My fiance's coworker is a graphic designer and he helped us with our design (invite and rsvp) for lunch.  We found an invitation we liked, scanned it, gave him a picture of it and told him (in detail) what we wanted changed on it, he did it in photoshop, and it took him about ten minutes.  Really, all we needed was photoshop...

So easy!

I do recommend getting the Sommerset paper -- it's not much more and it really looks and feels fabulous.  We ordered our envelopes in bulk from Crane's to save some cash, but their prices have gone up since then.