Best Personalised Wedding Favours UK: Which Format Fits Your Day

"Best wedding favours" is an awkward thing to search for, because the honest answer depends on two numbers you already know: how many people are coming, and what you are happy to spend per head. A favour that works beautifully for forty guests in a barn falls apart at a hundred and fifty.

We make personalised wedding favours and wedding stationery by hand in our studio in Hessle. The four formats below cover nearly every request that comes through, and they do very different jobs. Here is what each one costs, who it suits, and where each one falls down.

The four formats, side by side

• Scratch card favours, 60p each. One per place setting, at any guest count. Four designs.

• Foiled tickets, £10 each. A keepsake for a handful of people, not for a whole room.

• Wedding and engagement prints, £8 to £14. Parents, the bridal party, anyone who did a job on the day.

• Bridesmaid scratch cards, £5.50 each. A different occasion entirely, months before the wedding.

Scratch card favours, if you want something on every place setting

At 60p a card, this is the only one of the four you can put in front of every guest without the total getting silly. A hundred guests comes to £60. There are four designs in wedding favour scratch cards: plain, thank you, eucalyptus and heart. The eucalyptus and thank you designs carry your wedding date as well as your names.

When you order you tell us the header wording, the prize, how many winning cards you want and how many losing cards, and which colour scratch sticker you want over the panel: silver, gold or holographic. So a table of eight might have one winner and seven near misses, or you can make every card a winner and use it as a seating game instead.

The catch is that a scratch card favour is only half a favour until you decide what the prize actually is, and have it sitting somewhere on the day. If you want help thinking that part through, the complete guide to wedding scratch card favours covers prize ideas and how many cards to order, and there is a wider list of budget wedding favour ideas if cost per guest is the thing driving the decision.

Foiled tickets, if a small number of people should keep something

Our foiled tickets are £10 each. They are 10cm by 21cm, printed on your choice of white, black or navy card, finished with real foil in one of about thirty colours, and they come with a white envelope (a coloured gift envelope is £1 more). The gig and concert ticket is the design most couples adapt, swapping the concert name for the wedding, the venue for the church or the barn, and the seat information for a table number or a message.

At £10 a head this is not a room-wide favour, and we would talk you out of it if you asked for a hundred. Where it works is the six or eight people you want to single out: parents, the best man, the friend who drove five hours, the one who did the flowers. Worth saying plainly, these are decorative keepsakes and not valid entry tickets to anything.

A framed print, for the few people who did the most

There are twenty one designs in wedding prints, from £8 to £14. The date and location print is £8 and puts your names, a calendar with the wedding date circled and a map of the place on one sheet. The wedding location map foil print is £14 with a heart over the town and your choice of foil colour. If you had readings or vows you want kept, your words in foil sets them out as artwork for £14.

Frames are made in the UK from solid wood in black, white or grey, and the front is 1.2mm acrylic rather than glass, which matters if the print is going in a house with small children in it. There is more on the range in our guide to personalised wedding and anniversary prints.

Bridesmaid cards are a different job entirely

People often lump these in with favours, but they happen months earlier and they are asking a question rather than saying thank you. The six designs in bridesmaid scratch cards are £5.50 each, and the "will you be my bridesmaid" panel scratches off the same way the favours do. There is a full bridesmaid proposal guide with wording ideas if that is the bit you are stuck on.

Working out the real cost per guest

The arithmetic for a hundred guest wedding, using our prices:

• Scratch card favours for everyone: 100 at 60p is £60, plus whatever the prizes cost you.

• Foiled tickets for everyone: 100 at £10 is £1,000. This is why we do not suggest it.

• A mix: 100 scratch cards (£60), six foiled tickets for the top table (£60), and a £14 print for each set of parents (£28) comes to £148 for the lot.

The mixed version is what most couples land on once they see the numbers. Every guest gets something with your names on it, and the handful of people who deserve more than a scratch card get more than a scratch card.

Which one, for which wedding

• Long guest list, tight budget: scratch cards for everyone, and put the money you saved into the prizes.

• Thirty guests or fewer: foiled tickets become affordable at that scale, and they get kept.

• You want the favour to double as entertainment: scratch cards with one real prize per table.

• You only really care about parents and the bridal party: skip room-wide favours and spend it on prints.

How ordering works

Everything above is made to order in Hessle, HU13. Whichever format you pick, we send you a proof before anything is printed, so you get to check the spelling of every name and the wording before it exists on card. That step matters more than usual here, because personalised items cannot be returned for a change of mind. If your wording is unusual or you want something adjusting, send us a message with the details and we will work it out before you order.

Where to start

If you want one thing on every place setting, start with wedding favour scratch cards at 60p. If you are buying for a small group of people rather than a room, start with wedding prints or foiled tickets. Most weddings we work on end up with a bit of both.