Gothic Wedding Invitations | A Guide from Birdhouse197

Couples usually come to us with their venue already booked and a vision board full of ideas. What we do is help tie all of that together, starting with the save the date that lets your guests know what kind of day they're being invited to, right through the full suite of invitations, menus, welcome boards and everything on the day itself.

We get a lot of couples who want the full gothic wedding dream, and just as many who want nods to it without going too heavy, which we love designing just as much. This guide is here to help you find your way in, whichever end of that you're at.

What Actually Makes a Wedding Gothic?

Honestly, a lot of it happens before we're even involved. It's part of a couple's personality they've grown up with and love, the things we love too. Ghosts, magic, tarot, horror films, any combination of it and more. When a couple sits down with us, we're already on the same page. That shared love is what makes the conversation easy, and it's usually what shows up in the final design.

If you want the fuller story, including our own gothic wedding in October 2022, we've written about it in more depth on Embrace the Elegance of a Goth Wedding. This guide is more about helping you actually choose.

Finding Your Way Around Our Gothic Collections

Every design we make has some connection to the gothic, even our lighter ranges. Some collections put it front and centre, like the skeleton lovers on 'Til Death Do Us Part, including our foiled Skeleton Lovers gatefold. Others sit in the same world with a different mood, The Bleeding Heart leans into Victorian anatomical romance, and Star-Crossed Lovers takes the Romeo and Juliet route with crossed swords alongside the hearts.

We split everything into four broad categories to help you get your bearings: Celestial & Mystical, Gothic & Dark Romance, Tarot & Symbolic, and Victorian & Vintage. There's genuine overlap between them by design, a tarot-inspired piece can sit just as easily in a celestial wedding as a gothic one. We're not trying to box anyone in. Getting to something that's actually right for you is always the goal, not fitting you into a category.

Most of our orders start as a conversation rather than a straight checkout. Our contact form is there to capture your vision so we can talk through ideas together, and we genuinely enjoy that part. If you want to see more of what we've made for other couples before you get in touch, our Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok are the best places to browse real orders in colour and in motion.

Worried About Going "Too Gothic"?

It's not a major issue, but we do hear it now and then, usually couples who love the look but don't want to scare off family with a skeleton front and centre. We always respect that. Weddings are sometimes a family affair, but ultimately it's your day.

There's a lot of room between full gothic and nothing at all. Our tarot-inspired designs draw directly from classic tarot illustration, so they capture the spirit of gothic without tipping into "too much" for most guests. Colour makes a bigger difference than people expect too. Taking a design like Skeleton Lovers and printing it in an off-white or pastel palette instead of black can shift the whole feeling without losing what made you love it in the first place.

Foil on Black

Foil finishes on black card genuinely earn their reputation. It's one of those things that's hard to capture properly in a photo or even on video, the way foil catches and moves with the light just doesn't translate the same way on a screen. If you want the real wow factor in person, our foiled Til Death Do Us Part gatefold is a good place to see it for yourself, though foiling only works on certain designs, so it's worth asking us directly if you've got your eye on something specific. We offer five foil finishes: gold, silver, copper, rose gold and iridescent.

When to Order

Every wedding and every order is a different size, so we'd rather be helpful than give you a rigid formula. As a general guide, we work to a 4 to 5 week lead time from order to delivery, including international orders. Save the dates are usually best sent 6 to 12 months ahead of the day, and invitations need a bit less runway, but it's always worth getting in touch early rather than right up against the wire.

October is our busiest time of year, plenty of couples choose it for the season alone, but we work all year round and manage our order book to make sure everything arrives in time regardless of when your wedding falls.

If photos alone aren't quite enough to picture how the foil, card weight and colours will actually look and feel, our invitation suite sample pack is the easiest way to hold a few of our real designs in your hands before you commit to anything.

Original Designs, Not a Template

Every piece starts as a hand drawn illustration before it's brought to print. We're not working from a template, and we're not an AI-generated design pulled together overnight. Our first designs, Crystal Ball and Skeleton Lovers, go back to 2019 and 2020, well before any of that was even a conversation in this industry. It means a lot when a couple tells us they recognise our work online before they've even spoken to us. Those conversations, whether at a wedding fair or through a message, are usually the ones that build the most trust, because our hearts are genuinely in this, and we're talking from real love for the genre, not a script.

We've loved being part of events like the Dark Wedding Collective and the Alt Wedding Fair, meeting couples in person who've followed us online and getting to talk through their ideas face to face.

Ready to Start?

Explore our gothic wedding ideas and alternative collections or get in touch and tell us about your day. We'll take it from there.

George & Joshua