You probably have a friend who managed to get his or her thank you notes out a week after the wedding, while on vacation in Aruba. Maybe the secret isn’t a type-A personality but the help of a robot.
Bond has been using robots that mimic your handwriting — using actual pen, ink, and stationery — since 2013. Now they’ve paired with startup Envelope, which makes registries, to tie the two together. While sites like Zola let your register for monetary contributions and gifts like sheets and toasters, Envelope is all about the cash. In the company’s sample registry for Jon and Ygritte, the couple has lots of outdoorsy, survivalist items listed, like baking lessons, a trusty knife, and a wilderness hike. (You’d think they’d be sick of that last one.) They asked for $150 for a new travel kit, and their friends and family (the ones who are cool with the union, anyway) can contribute whatever they like.
Zola and Honeyfund charge a 2.7 percent credit card processing fee for these kinds of transactions, but Envelope more than doubles it and charges six percent. You can choose if you want to take the hit or pass it on to your guests.
Once you’ve racked up all your gifts, though, is where Envelope differentiates itself. The service isn’t cheap — it’s $4.50 a note — but its robots will write all your thank yous in one of 18 different styles. You type the message, and the robot takes pen to paper. Unlike a font that’s made to look like handwriting, all the g’s, e’s, and p’s on the card they sent me looked a little different.
“Our collaboration with Bond means we can dramatically simplify the entire thank you card writing process,” co-founder Simon Baldwin told Digital Trends. “We manage all of the logistics, like what the guest gave and their postal address, so that all the couple needs to do is focus penning a heartfelt thanks.”
If your handwriting is atrocious, you just made a lot of cash from your wedding, and you want the old-school experience, it’s definitely a unique way to go.
Unfortunately, Envelope doesn’t take care of the hardest part of thank you notes: coming up with the text that won’t make you sound like a robot. At least you can take a few cues from this generator.
