In this blog, we’ll explore how to embrace a sustainable wedding without sacrificing sophistication. Your wedding invitations are the first impression your loved ones will have of your Big Day, setting the tone for your wedding, and with sustainability being a top priority for a lot of modern couples, this should be extended to your wedding stationery. By choosing sustainable wedding invitations, you don’t have to compromise on elegance. At de Havilland Memories, we specialise in using a variety of methods to help you on your way to an eco friendly wedding.
Why Choose Sustainable Wedding Invitations?
There are many reasons to choose to have a sustainable wedding, and sustainable wedding invitations are just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to eco conscious wedding planning. A lot of couples are living a more eco conscious lifestyle and so with sustainability being an important part of everyday life, it makes sense to extend this to your wedding as well. Not only will your wedding be a reflection of your own values, but it will also encourage your guests to think more sustainably, setting a precedent that can inspire your loved ones to make more environmentally friendly choices in their daily life.
With so many different options available, there’s no need to sacrifice luxury for sustainability, with many high-end wedding vendors being transparent with their sustainability policies. An amazing resource to help with your eco friendly wedding planning is the Sustainable Wedding Alliance, which not only has a directory of like-minded suppliers, but also a very useful blog.
The Benefits of Eco friendly wedding Invitations
Unique & Luxurious Materials
Sustainable wedding stationery doesn’t have to mean brown, boring, recycled paper, but instead can boast beautifully curated, handmade paper, made from cotton rag with a stunningly deep, letterpress finish. It can mean seed paper invitations, embellished with real, pressed flower petals embedded into the paper itself to bring a pop of colour to an otherwise timeless design or thick bamboo card, with a silky smooth texture and elegant, embossed floral designs.
Just the paper choices alone are endless, let alone the hand-finished embellishments, such as naturally dyed, silk ribbon tying your delightfully sustainable wedding invitations suite together. By choosing to have a sustainable wedding, you’re choosing vendors who think outside the box when it comes to finding elegant solutions.
Environmental Impact
Most eco centric wedding vendors will have some form of sustainability policy or statement available for couples to view and this will usually contain a statement about single-use plastics. By ditching single-use plastics and going plastic free, such as with de Havilland Memories, you can feel proud about reducing the carbon footprint of your wedding and reducing the waste going to landfill.
Not only have you actively chosen to reduce deforestation and waste, but you have also supported ethical craftsmanship, ensuring that every detail of your wedding stationery reflects your values. By opting for sustainable materials and responsible production methods, you are contributing to a greener future while still embracing timeless elegance. Your sustainable wedding invitations will not only leave a lasting impression on your guests but also a positive impact on the planet.
Timeless Designs
As mentioned before, ethically sustainable brands tend to be out-of-the-box thinkers when it comes to novel solutions to problems as they’re required to do so to ensure their products align with their values. This leads to some of the most beautiful, elegant and timeless designs being born out of sustainable thinking. At de Havilland Memories, we’ve researched many different products to guarantee both quality and sustainability in our offerings, this has led us to find novel and unexpected materials, such as seed paper with botanical elements, and many more, which all inspire our designs to be more unique and personal than ever.
de Havilland Memories is a proud member of the Sustainable Wedding Alliance and is also a finalist for the Sustainable Wedding Awards 2025 for the Sustainable by Design category. Whilst it might seem that wedding stationery in general isn’t environmentally friendly, almost all of the materials we use are not only high-quality, but also ethically sourced. Opting for FSC-certified or recycled paper ensures that forests are managed ethically, and also using paper that is derived from cotton rags or bamboo negates the need for cutting down our trees in the first place.
Seeded paper invitations are a really good example of sustainable wedding trends. Using materials, such as plantable seed paper, adds a deeper, sentimental value to your beautiful, sustainable wedding invitations. With various wildflowers and grasses sprouting in your guests’ gardens each year, they’re a beautiful alternative for a zero waste wedding.
Supporting Ethical Brands
Choosing ethical suppliers helps promote eco-conscious craftsmanship across all sectors of the wedding industry. Many small, local businesses are the ones supporting sustainable practices, and therefore you’re also helping these artisan and family run businesses, which in turn is helping the economy. You can find these suppliers via green directories, such as the Sustainable Wedding Alliance and Green Union. Eco conscious brands will have a sustainability policy in place, such as the one at de Havilland Memories, which you can find here.
The main aim of de Havilland Memories is not just to create a stress-free, seamless experience for all of our couples, but to also become net-zero by the end of 2029. We aim to do this by ensuring the remainder of our suppliers are all at least FSC certified or have a robust sustainability statement or policy in place. What little carbon footprint we can’t reduce, we’ll offset with re-forestation schemes, whilst also looking into carbon capture initiatives. We find it imperative that we protect our planet at all costs, and therefore promise to keep improving and updating our sustainability strategy.
How to Incorporate Sustainability into Your Wedding Invitations
As you can see, there are many ways to incorporate sustainability into your wedding stationery, the easiest of which is to choose a local stationer with a sustainability policy or statement in place. This will enable you to easily see if they align with your core values and which parts of their business really resonate with you as a couple.
Unfortunately, as beautiful as foil wedding invitations are, they’re not able to be recycled, and therefore are a no-go among the eco friendly wedding community. There is good news, however! Letterpress printing is one of the most environmentally friendly forms of printing as it tends to be done in small workshops, by hand, using cotton-rag paper and sustainable inks and with little to no electricity to run the machine.
Letterpress invitations have a delightfully tactile feel to them as the design is physically pressed into the paper, embossing the information into the invitation. Despite being an old, traditional form of printing, it’s had a resurgence in the high-end market due to its luxurious feel. The entire letterpress printing process is incredibly satisfying, from start to finished product, which is part of the reason why we offer in-house letterpress printing on our beautiful Heidelberg Platen printing press, Penelope, for our customers.
Final Thoughts: A Lasting Legacy
With many couples choosing sustainability for their wedding, every detail can be carefully curated to tell not only your love story, but also a story of environmental responsibility. From the paper to the printing method, your sustainable wedding invitations can contribute to a greener future whilst also remaining a timeless keepsake. With unique materials, such as seed paper combined with letterpress printing, your invitations become more than just paper, they become cherished memories.
If sustainability is important to you, consider working with like-minded vendors who share your vision for an eco-conscious wedding. Explore de Havilland Memories’ bespoke, sustainable wedding stationery options and let us help you create invitations that are as meaningful as they are beautiful.
When you’re ready to take the next step, simply jump on a discovery call with us to help your dreams become a reality.
Venue: https://www.instagram.com/venuelambeth/
Planner & Stylist: https://www.instagram.com/4yaparty/
Furniture: https://www.instagram.com/myfurniturehire/
Photographer: https://www.instagram.com/jemimajewellphotography/
Videographer: https://www.instagram.com/lauriebfilmandphotography/
Cake artist: https://www.instagram.com/greenfoxbakery/
Clothes Designer: https://www.instagram.com/susannah_henley_london/
Stationery: https://www.instagram.com/dehavillandmemories/
Hair, Makeup & Accessories: www.instagram.com/nat_claire_nofilterrequired/
Band: https://www.instagram.com/bespokelive/
Model Couple: https://www.instagram.com/hannahchappelldale/
Model Bridesmaid: https://www.instagram.com/
