Holly:
I have a question and you are my go to girl for this kind of thing, if you are inviting people to a wedding and you have a hall for say 200 people. do you only invite 200 people? or should I invite more because inevitably not every one will show? How much of an overage should you invite to reach the number that you want?
Johnell:
Holly, we get this question all of the time. Usually I plan for about 15-20% shrinkage. So if I wanted 200 to show up I would invite 215-230. However, I have run into the occasional popular couple, in which case EVERYONE wants to be there. If you know you have a ton of friends, and you know people are going to want to be joining you and you don't have a bunch of travelers, expect the very opposite. The signs of a growing party are people emailing, Facebooking and calling you asking where their invite is. And YES this does happen, even though it's terrible etiquette. If this begins to happen you may need to up your numbers to account for it. But, again this is rare and typically only happens with 1 out of 10 parties we deal with. I hope this answers your question!!