How it all began

We are often asked how we started our business, some of our customers have known us for long enough to know our beginnings but for those who don’t know here is our story.

Stephanie used to make handmade cards and scrapbooking pages with her mum as a bit of fun and a hobby in the early 2000s. As they made more cards for family and friends, Stephanie was asked to make wedding invitations for people. Demand soon grew for her handmade wedding invites and that is where I (Andy) come in to it. I was drafted in to help with cutting and sticking on large orders. Which was surprisingly quite therapeutic at the time, despite the fact I was always useless at creative art at school.
In 2004 we decided to open the business known as Mexborough Cards and Crafts working from home. We established that the demand for wedding stationery was growing and we changed the name of the business to Yorkshire Wedding Invites.

We ran the business part time (mainly run by Steph) from what was once a dining room at home until 2015. In 2015 I was ill health retired from my full time job and we made the very dramatic scary decision to go ‘all in’ and open a shop offering the only bricks and mortar wedding stationery shop in the UK. I can not tell you the amount of work and sleepless nights that went into this decision!!

So in January 2016 we opened the doors to Yorkshire Wedding Invites and Engraving LTD. We decided we wanted to offer laser engraved personalised gifts along with our wedding stationery an purchased our first laser machine. This was it no regular income to fall back on, we were on our own!!

After many amazing ups there were of course as many devastating downs, and boy do these hit hard when you are the ones responsible for everything!!!

BUT we survived the first year, second year and yes a third year in our Doncaster road shop, however we soon realised we needed a bigger and better built shop.

We moved to our current shop location at Swinton Yard on the opposite side of the road to screwfix and tool station. We took a leap of faith and prayed that this was going to be the right move. So in January 2020 we opened our doors and celebrated our busiest ever month and wow what a year it was looking to be….

…Then there was COVID ffs could this be that bad? Ha yes it can!!! Everything locked down no weddings for 18months and almost no income. We just about scraped by, lord knows how but we did and we were still trading when restrictions began to lift.

Since then we have re built our business from the ground up, we are now much more stable and a much better business for it. In our down time in lock downs we didn’t just sit twiddling our thumbs we were busy working to make our business more customer focused, something we will continue to adapt continually.

So here we are now, we have such an amazing client base and we can not thank you all enough, the pleasure we get from making products people treasure really pushes us on.

Here is to the future!!
Thank you again
Steph and Andy
xxx