The invitation is the first taste of the experience.
principle — attributed to Marc Friedland
Friedland built a multi-million-dollar business on a category most people overlook: the invitation. Done right, an invitation is a mixed-media event in its own right, touching the senses on multiple levels through storytelling, tactility, and design. The invitation sets the tone for everything that follows. The principle inverts the standard event-budget allocation, which treats invitations as commodity stationery. A new generation of digital natives crave the experiential. Receiving an interactive influencer box or sculptural invitation is a new experience that primes everything else. Hosts who undervalue the invitation are skipping the first touchpoint and arriving at the event with guests whose expectations have not been set.
For event hosts, brand experience leads, and luxury communicators thinking about budget allocation. The principle is most useful as a corrective when invitations have been delegated to a stationery vendor without strategic input.
invitations, keepsake, tone-setting, first-impression