Of the entire wedding planning process, our invitations were by far the WORST experience. Everyone at paperwhirl is completely incompetent. If you want to flip through a sample book, point to an invitation and substitute your names and wedding date, I'm sure the process would be easy and stress free. However, if you want to do any kind of real customization like: change paper color, change text color, add your own picture, etc, prepare for months of HELL. They promised us a 2-3 week turnaround time. that turned into 10 weeks. Our invitations went out 4 weeks before the wedding!!!!
What's wrong with them specifically? No one knows how to use a computer. No one knows anything about types of image files (jpg vs tiff, vs gif). They did not make us feel like our case was a priority (even after things had been running late) - our case "handler" worked 1pm-8pm which is WAY too late for her to communicate with the actual printer on the east coast, and it didn't occur to anyone else there that maybe they could help us out if they come to work earlier.
We were originally going to go there to get our programs and menus printed, but after our experience, we just did them ourselves. It was more important to avoid stress than to have matching paper stock.
We had paid them a deposit of 30% I think before the process began. At the end of the process, they didn't even bother to call me and tell me of the final bill or to ask my permission to charge me. They just went ahead and took the rest of the payment. AND they lost our unused envelopes. (They had them reprinted at no cost to us.)
