Online Stationery Company Gains a Fashionable Following NYTimes.com

IN Washington, the same week Barack Obama took office, a young staff member for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice enlisted Paperless Post, a new online stationery service, to help put together a going-away party for her boss.

Skip to next paragraph Greg Scaffidi for The New York Times

James and Alexa Hirschfeld of Paperless Post.

Greg Scaffidi for The New York Times

Two examples of their work.

The interactive correspondence “was all anybody wanted to talk about,” said Sarah Lenti, who went on to work for Mitt Romney — the way the hyperreal envelope with the invitee’s name appears on the computer, how it reverses to the sender’s on the back, and then the pièce de résistance invitation pops out, so detailed you can see the paper’s grain. How intuitive it was to click on the RSVP and fill out the reply card. Zac Posen had used it for a benefit, as had some Diane Von Furstenberg folks, and the Young Friends of the Elie Wiesel Foundation were about to try it.

Paperless Post, which is in New York, is a venture of Alexa Hirschfeld, 25, and her brother James, 23. It enables users to design, send and track e-vites and other social summonses on the Web while maintaining easy correctness and a life’s-a-party air reminiscent of old-fashioned mailings. The siblings have handled 60,000 invitations since January, and 150,000 since their membership-based operations began last fall.

“The Internet has been a kind of vacuum in terms of aesthetics,” Ms. Hirschfeld said. “We wanted to leverage functionality with design.” So many people, she added, had gotten bored with such easy-virtue social tools as Facebook or Evite. The recession-related closing of Madison Avenue stationer Mrs. John L. Strong last month further suggests to the Hirschfelds that their customer base will expand.

The economic climate “definitely put the wind in our sails,” Mr. Hirschfeld said. “People say they would rather save ,000 by not getting printed invitations, and invite four more friends to their wedding.” The fee structure for Paperless Post works on a sliding scale with the purchase of virtual stamps bearing the company’s carrier-pigeon logo, starting at for 60 e-mailings.

The Hirschfelds are operating in a clutch of pods surrounded by lipstick samplers in space subleased from the French cosmetics company Bourjois, on Fifth Avenue near 17th Street. A business plan and a financial model outlining the dent they believe they can make in the billion made-to-order stationery market provided them with their first round of financing (almost million) from a group that includes Mousse Partners, an investment firm. Ms. Hirschfeld had been working at CBS News for Katie Couric but quit, “because I was interested in this more powerful platform,” she said.

They decided against on-site advertising, which would be like “getting a flyer inside a wedding invitation,” Mr. Hirschfeld said.

Still, Pamela Fiori, the editor in chief of Town & Country, does not approve. “In a world increasingly uncivilized,” she said, “it’s important that we have some ties to tradition. And I honestly think that what we’re losing with e-mail are our memories.”

Some older users print their Paperless Post missives, Ms. Hirschfeld said, but “for most it’s about the beauty, not holding a piece of paper in your hand.”

The practically size-zero carbon footprint is an added attraction. “It’s completely green,” said Celine Kaplan, spokeswoman for Eres, who has orchestrated fashion debuts with Paperless Post.

The Hirschfelds have added letterhead templates alongside the more personal alternatives, and have steadily accumulated concept categories, fonts, motifs, border patterns, paper colors, sizes, stock and textures. They browse notions emporiums in the garment district for decorations. They work with a designer, a stylist and a photographer to create their prototypes, and work with their technology brainiacs on the Web site, which also provides hosts with a RSVP tracking system and the ability to sell and buy tickets to events.

“We basically digested Crane’s Blue Book of Etiquette and Emily Post,” Ms. Hirschfeld said, for the application that generates wording choices. Mr. Hirschfeld’s first design, dark red with a border of zebras, was inspired by the wallpaper at the restaurant Gino on the Upper East Side.

Vanessa Bain, a vice president at an equity fund in New York, is using Paperless Post for her Bermuda wedding, and she said the beach motif the Web site produced will resurface on the paper invitations to the ceremony itself. “The ordering took an hour online rather than having to meet in a store, and then wait two and a half weeks for printed invitations,” she said, “and I have friends and relatives in places like Brazil, who will get what I e-mail almost the instant I send it.”

More Topics:
LogoYes
Online do-it-yourself company logo creation tools from LogoYes. Build an original logo without the costly, time-consuming process of working with a graphic designer.