Aura Print has given customers the chance to choose from a selection of 18 templates for the cards, on over 20 different paper types, including stocks of up to 800gsm.

Liam Smith, Aura Print’s managing director, told Printweek that the marketing campaign was aimed at helping Aura break into the competitive wedding stationery scene by doing something good.

He said: “Everyone’s feeling the pinch right now, so even if customers only want to take us up on the freebie, there’s no hoops to jump through.

“Really, we hope that our service is that good, and customers like the designs and paper choices that much, when they need invites or RSVPs printing later on in the planning stages they’ll become a returning customer.

“And if not, well, we’ve still helped some couples get some luxurious wedding save the dates for their big day and saved them a bunch in the process.”

Aura Print runs its Save the Dates off its two Ricoh digital presses, the Pro C9200 and Pro C7200x, which it installed recently. Any foiling that is required is then overprinted on the firm’s Konica Minolta AccurioPress C6085.

Zoey Robins, Aura Print’s marketing and content executive, said the company came up with the idea when trying to work out what it could do to help customers with the cost-of-living crisis, adding that the cause is close to her heart.

“I am myself engaged and will struggle to afford a wedding, and so I’m not getting married any time soon - and after a little bit of research, it came out that there are thousands and thousands of couples in exactly the same position,” she told Printweek.

“So I think for couples who were perhaps thinking of going for cheaper options, or even handmaking their Save the Dates, which we’ve seen is quite common at the moment - it’s just a nice thing to be able to give them at the very beginning of the wedding planning process.”

Aura Print has also recently bought a VeloBlade Volta 64 die-cutter from Vivid Laminating Technologies, which went in at the firm's 650sqm Huddersfield site in August.

The company had wanted the flexibility to produce die-cut products in-house, having previously had to outsource nearly 100 die-cut jobs a month.

Smith said: "With the VeloBlade Volta 64, we can now die-cut over 90% of jobs with faster turnaround times and lower cost for our customers making die-cut business cards more reachable for more customers.

“Additionally, we have also switched to kiss cutting all stickers on the VeloBlade and the system has opened the doors for us to produce bespoke packaging. Which has really come in handy given how much customers are taking us up on custom playing cards.”

He added that the ability to create unlimited prototypes, without having to create forms for each, had all but solved those problems.

"Overall, the support we've received from Vivid has been top notch."