Cleverly named wedding stationery OutVite (who happened to send me an e-mail a while back) sells custom printed invitations and other paper products designed for the LGBT community. As much as I want to cheer them on, I’m just not sure they are truly marketing to a niche market that has been ignored until now. Before I explain why, let me say that I am all for wedding stationery created for people who weren’t cut from the quasi-traditional Caucasian-bride-and-groom-in-their-early-20s mold. After all, my mother is engaged to be married to another woman, and I’m glad to see that she could get a wedding invitation with two brides on it if she in fact wanted one.
While a goodly number of OutVite’s designs feature two men, two women, two wedding dresses, two pairs of boxer shorts, and other graphics indicating that the participants in the wedding will be people who also happen to be homosexual, most of the invitation and wedding shower invite designs could be used by homosexual and heterosexual couples alike… just like most wedding stationery everywhere. Sure, some wedding stationery features a bride and groom motif, but lots more is embellished with simple bands of color, ribbons, logos, hearts and what-have-you, or other images, themes, and/or doo-dads.
Like I said, I’m definitely glad to see multi-bride or multi-groom or multi-whatever wedding invitations, shower invitations, response cards, and all that jazz. In fact, I’d like to see more of it! It’s not hard to find gorgeous wedding stationery, but it can be hard to find, say, gorgeous wedding stationery in different colors and designs that features the silhouettes of two women or two men. I guess that’s why I was a little disappointed in OutVite. I scrolled through seven pages of invitations, and only a handful were specifically geared toward homosexual couples. The rest were lovely, but not what I’d call “Gay and Lesbian Stationery.”
Unless it’s the stationery itself that’s homosexual, heh.