Practical Ways to Achieve Elegant Wedding Favors on A Budget

The wedding preparation process is an exciting process many have written home about. What they haven’t pointed out specifically is that the entire process is an equally arduous accounting endeavor.

Crunching through the numbers to save money where you could extends to every component of your wedding including favors preparation.

You should breathe a sigh of relief knowing that cutting back on the budget does not always mean the results have to be uninspiring. Even with a tight budget, with a little more effort and careful thoughts, there are still ways you can make the wedding favors look presentable and attractive. All that while not making your wedding reception photography any less captivating.

Are Wedding Favors Necessary?

Well, this is one question you might have asked yourself before.

Wedding favors are of course not a necessity. In fact, no component of the wedding is ever necessary as it is primarily a special occasion celebrating the start of life’s journey for two loving persons.

Irrespective of what opinions others may give, you should go with how you feel.

How To Save On Wedding Favors?

Cheap but good wedding favors?! Who doesn’t like that idea.

The key here is to go a step further and get cheap but useful wedding favors that the guests can use or consume.

Should you decide, or have decided, to press ahead with the gifting of wedding favors, then read on.

There are always ways around something if your will is strong enough to achieve it.

In this aspect of favor preparation though, you have to be prepared to put in a bit of work and time yourself. Some D.I.Y. application along the way, if you may.

Only Buy The Bare Favors

If there’s only so much to go around, you’d spend it where it matters the most!

Forget all the fancy boxes or expensive packaging. You should just spend the bulk of your limited budget on buying the bare item itself.

There are vendors that provide you the option of opting for the bare item without gift box packaging. Oftentimes when you do so you get to save anything up to a dollar per favor.

Should the option of buying without the gift box packaging not be available, you can alternatively shop for the type of favors that can be presented as stand-alone without any type of additional boxing.

The best cheap wedding favor ideas in the market are not surprisingly those that come with minimal packaging.

Buying Locally VS From Overseas

Buying from a local vendor would always be cheaper compared to buying from an overseas one, in shipping cost term. That’s if you’re comparing apples to apples.

Provided that you can find a local vendor that can supply you the same item of similar quality to its overseas counterpart, you get to save on international shipping. Do not underestimate its impact on the overall costs.

It’s not one or two small items you’re shipping home, when the number is in the hundreds the bulk and weight adds up and so does the shipping cost.

Buying local could also mean that you can possibly request the vendor for samples, if they indeed provide such a service. Even if the provision of samples isn’t available, shopping locally in the physical stores may allow you to see and feel the items before buying.

It’s in our nature to always think the grass is greener on the other side, when in fact locally available products can be just as good.

That said, do your research online. If your sole aim is price, you’d be surprised that sometimes buying online from an overseas store may be cheaper.

Plan & Buy Ahead of Time

The key to staying in control of costs and time is to always plan ahead.

Planning and buying ahead of time afford you the time buffer in case some unexpected delay occurs. Delays in shipping or products being out-of-stock requiring wait time can happen.

If it’s not perishable food items with a very short shelf life, buying early with some time to spare can save you from running into last-minute panic situations.

Allowing a time buffer doesn’t so much as save you some costs. It is when there are delays and it becomes increasingly likely that you won’t receive them on time that you’re forced to look for a last-minute substitute solution.

That can either mean more money or canceling gifting of wedding favors altogether.

Therefore, knowing when to buy wedding favors would be really helpful for your wedding planning tasks.

Simplified Packaging Can Look Just As Good

When you buy the bare favors, you’d obviously need some sort of outer packaging.

Although this would mean more research, you can always buy a cheaper gift box or gift bag packaging separately. Shopping for the packaging separately gives you the opportunity to get packaging solutions that are cheaper than if you’d gotten them from the original favor vendor.

Once you get the packaging sorted, some D.I.Y. ribbons or favor tags can give the favors the finishing touches that match your wedding theme.

If you think design isn’t one of your strong suits, think color. Regardless of the portion that is D.I.Y, matching color palette to your wedding theme would usually be a safe choice.

Conversely, should you decide to save on the cost and time doing the ribbons and tags, you can opt to house the favors in a box or small container. The choice of box or container should be kept as simple as possible.

The DIY portions are where you could really use your imagination to achieve cheap but elegant wedding favors that the guests can’t help but take notice of!

You’d also find that packaging plays quite a big part in managing the average cost of wedding favors per guest, as this linked article outlined with a useful breakdown for your easy reference.

Where To Place Wedding Favors

Optimizing your budget for wedding favors also involves getting the total number of favors prepared as close as possible to the actual number taken up by the guests.

There are a number of considerations you should take into account when calculating the total number of favors you need to prepare. Minimizing the number of favors that you could potentially over-provide is one safe way to ensure you don’t overspend!

In the most basic sense, you provide one favor to one guest. And that is if every guest knows to expect one.

If you decide to provide favors in a lesser number than the guests that are expected to attend, the key here is to place them where the guests would not naturally expect to get one.

That is when you can choose to display all the favors centrally, most probably by the main entrance of the wedding reception.

Aside from addressing the favors take-up rate that could be lower than the total number of guests present, displaying the wedding favors centrally can provide you with some unique shots for your wedding photographer.