The royal family loves a good wedding – Henry VIII liked them so much he walked down the aisle an impressive six times, while Edward VIII was so keen to wed his twice-divorced American belle Wallis Simpson he abdicated to enable it. 

And it used to be the case that the British public loved royal weddings too, embracing them with the vigour of Prince Harry at a fancy dress party. For the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, for example, 600,000 people lined the streets of London, while an estimated 750m watched on telly around the world. People who had previously shown no interest in the goings on at the palace suddenly bought up hoards of memorabilia, from mugs to tea towels, and from books to special newspaper editions. For the print industry, a royal wedding has previously been quite the cash cow.  
But, this time, things have gone a bit sour. After initial joy at the announcement that Prince William would be wedding his girlfriend Kate Middleton on 29 April, interest seemed to go downhill.

First up came grumbles that the wedding would mean a paid day off, contributing to the event costing the UK economy an estimated £2.9bn. Then it became clear that everyone would be using this day off to take an extended weekend break out of the country, not as an opportunity to flatter the royal ego. And now it has been revealed that the anticipated glut of street parties will not be anywhere near previous levels – with just 4,000 applications for road closures. This time round, the interest in a royal wedding doesn’t seem to be there and so some fear print’s opportunity for a big pay day may have gone too as a result, while others warn that what demand may be there might be serviced by cheap imports, not UK printers.
To its credit, the Lord Chamberlain’s office has at least made it easier than it could have been to produce unofficial items for the occasion. It has relaxed the rules around using royal photographs and insignia for souvenir items commemorating both the engagement and wedding. However, it has ruled inappropriate any textile items that are deemed disposable, favouring long lasting items such as china, porcelain and biscuit tins. For printers, that still leaves a lot of scope if the demand for goods can be proven.

For official merchandise, the case for demand could not be clearer cut. Nuala McGourty, head of the Royal Collection’s retail division, has said demand for the official china plate for the wedding has been 30 times higher than expected and that sales were far above those of plates commemorating the weddings of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, and Prince Edward and Sophie Rhys-Jones.

Many argue that interest in unofficial items is just as fervent. Ray Duffy, managing director at mask printer and retailer Mask-arade, says demand for his royal family masks has soared since the engagement was announced, with the business shifting more than 100,000 Prince William and Kate Middleton masks alone and selling thousands of masks of the rest of the family. He believes that the royal wedding is once again proving a huge boost for print.

Massive impact
"The wedding has had a massive impact, we have had to take on two new staff and seek new premises to cope with the scale of the demand," he explains. "We are currently printing another 20,000 each of Kate and William to keep up with orders."

Mask-arade is by no means an exception. As the big day looms, the market is increasingly being populated by wedding-related print products. A host of special magazines have been launched, including two printed by William Gibbons and a bookazine collaboration by PrintWeek publisher Haymarket and Illustrated London News, which was printed at St Ives. Devon’s LCD publishing, meanwhile, has printed a Pretty Princess Wedding comic and most of the newspapers will be doing supplements and extended coverage of the celebrations. Elsewhere, Honey Tree Publishing has reported that royal wedding party invitations are "selling like hot cakes", while Royal Wedding Top Trumps, made by Winning Moves and printed by Richard Edward, have attracted a lot of press attention.

In the book world, things are just as bouyant, with The Bookseller reporting that more than 40 royal-wedding-related books were being published in 2011. Top of that list for sales is Knit Your Own Royal Wedding, initially printed in Italy but being reprinted by Westdale Press. Nikki Tilbury, associate publisher at the book’s publisher, Ivy Press, says the book has been a massive success.

"Sales have been great," she reveals. "It’s been really exciting, especially as we topped the Amazon bestsellers’ list for an hour, toppling Jamie Oliver’s latest tome!"

Alan Padbury, managing director at Westdale Press, adds that the book has also proved a big hit in the Westdale office: "I have just discovered that one of my estimators has bought one and is half way through a corgi!"

There are countless more items to choose from, be it mugs and key rings, or even beer mats, but while many agree that demand is certainly there for the wedding-related products, there is some disagreement as to the scale of that demand. Mask-arade’s Duffy obviously believes the interest in the royal wedding is very broad, but Louisa Moger, marketing manager at playing card printing specialist Richard Edward, believes interest is a little bit more selective. Hence, for the company’s special edition royal wedding playing cards, they opted for a limited run.

 "It’s clearly not something that is going to appeal to everyone, which is why we didn’t think a mass production run was appropriate for this type of product," she explains. "We identified the segment of the market we thought this product would appeal to and that led us to go for the limited edition run of 500, of which we have had pre-orders of around 360."

This may seem like a small run, but the timing of the royal wedding does make it easier for people to be less interested in the occasion than they would perhaps normally be. The day off on the wedding day itself falls in a period of bank holiday breaks that enable the British public to take 11 days holiday for the cost of just three days off work – many people are using this to go on holiday, not to attend or watch the royal wedding and buy memorabilia. Meanwhile, with government cuts beginning to bite, some are not keen to support what they believe is a wastefully opulent event.

International event
But to linger on these elements would be to ignore the fact that a royal wedding is a truly global event – the empire of the past is still taking an interest in its former rulers and the US appetite for all thinks monarchical is as fervent as ever. So it is unsurprising that culture secretary Jeremy Hunt is predicting the global TV audience for the wedding to be around the 2bn mark – that’s a huge potential market for printers.

A global audience, though, means global competition in the bid to cash in, especially in the print industry where cheap imports are already a blight on the UK market. Frustratingly, many royal wedding products are already being produced abroad and BPIF corporate affairs director Andrew Brown says the threat from overseas is a real one. 

"There will definitely be a boost for print, because souvenirs and memorabilia clearly have to be printed," he explains. "However, how much of this stuff is going to be printed in the UK? There is a real threat from imports from overseas. We are not talking about short-run print in a hurry that would obviously go to UK businesses, the date has been known well in advance and therefore people have been able to place orders well in advance as well, which obviously could mean work goes abroad." 

Fortunately for UK print, it doesn’t seem to be losing out to badly, as the natively produced print jobs cited in this article demonstrate. Also, some of the jobs that have gone abroad have encountered some high-profile problems, including the Chinese company that produced a wedding mug with the face of Prince Harry upon it instead of Prince William – a helpful mistake for UK print.

Overall, it seems that this royal wedding may not have the impact of past royal weddings in terms of the scale of print memorabilia, but clearly many UK businesses are going to enjoy a boost from the occasion.

Whether this will assuage the concerns of printers having to pay staff for an unscheduled day off is debatable, but those who have got some work as a result of the wedding will surely be wishing the happy couple well – even if it’s from a sunny foreign beach where they’ve headed to make use of the extra bank holiday.

THE ROYAL INVITE
The official invite for the royal wedding was printed by an undisclosed printer with a royal charter. Print historian and
typographic expert Caroline Archer gives her view:
The unimaginative typography has been relieved by the quality of the printing. The EIIR heraldic crest is die-stamped in gold and then burnished; the text is also die-stamped and the edges are beveled then gilded. It has been beautifully printed, but all the die-stamping, burnishing, bevelling and gilding are wasted on a design that is straight from a high-street catalogue of wedding invitations. The design incorporates the traditional elements of the heraldic crest and has been typeset using the strong calligraphic strokes of Perpetua italic. While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the typeface, the choice of the italic is clichéd, and it has been used with absolutely no typographic knowledge or sensitivity.