Creativity, craft, and AI at Paperless Post

By James Hirschfeld

Co-Founder and CEO, Paperless Post

My sister and I founded Paperless Post in 2009 with a simple belief: parties and gatherings are important, and they’re worth making personal and inspiring. Our mission, to help people gather more easily and meaningfully in real life for all the moments that matter, has guided every decision we’ve made since.

From the beginning, we’ve worked to combine the best of modern technology with the best of hand craftsmanship. I designed our first invitations by hand, inspired by the best of beautiful stationery and classic illustration. As we grew, we built an exceptionally talented in-house design team, who have conceived and crafted thousands of designs through illustration, animation, graphic design, and studio photography. On any given day, you’ll find our team painting, making hand-laid paper, felting, and scouring New York City’s museums and archives for inspiration.

Early on, we began inviting other creative collaborators we admire onto our platform: stationers, illustrators, craftspeople, and designers from the worlds of fashion, interiors, accessories, even confectionery. Whether up-and-coming or household names, every collaborator brings an original creative perspective to Paperless Post.

The exciting part of our brand is not just the craftsmanship itself, but how we bring that craftsmanship online and make it accessible and customizable to anyone with an internet connection. From the beginning, we’ve used technology to let users take a hand-crafted design and digitally make it their own, starting with simple text editing and envelope accessorizing, and steadily expanding to offer richer ways to customize. Over the past 16 years, the technology available to us has changed exponentially, and we’ve always tried to put the best of it to work in the service of our brand mission. The same is true today as we navigate the complex and exciting age of AI. 

AI is the most significant technological shift we’ve experienced, with the potential to impact every aspect of the product, including our design offering. I’m cautiously optimistic about how it can help people gather more easily and create invitations that reflect the nuance of their true selves. At the same time, we are doubling down on our investment in human creativity: adding more independent artists and designers to our contributor platform than ever this year, and increasing investment in our in-house creative team. We are doing this because now, more than ever, we feel truly original work will stand out in a sea of derivative design. 

Here’s what does excite me: AI can now let our users take the work of a talented artist and make it truly their own in ways that weren’t possible before. A parent can take an invitation with a mermaid on it and adapt it to look like their child, down to the hair texture and eye color. A couple can adapt a color palette to suit their wedding without compromise. A host can tailor an invitation to honor their specific cultural traditions, reflect an inside joke, or express their personal sense of humor. These are real creative desires that people have always had, and now we can actually meet these needs at scale.

But we’re being deliberate about how we do this, and we’ve articulated our principles:

AI is a tool, not the creator. The invitations and greetings we offer at Paperless Post are a form of human expression, and our users expect them to be curated, high-quality, and genuinely expressive. The original designer of an invitation is a human, just as the host sending it is a human, and that is why human designers are who we platform. Cultural fluency, lived experience, a sense of what is beautiful, meaningful, and funny: these are things people bring to creative work that no model can replicate. There is real nuance, richness, and value in a human point of view, and we don’t believe those qualities can be matched by a machine. The role of AI in our product is primarily to help users adapt and personalize great design. We are not replacing our in-house or partner designers with AI-generated libraries.  Every invitation on our platform still starts as a sketch, discussed and refined by our team or our collaborators before it ever reaches a customer. AI extends the reach of that human creative work. It does not substitute for it.

We will offer tools that make users look good. We’ve built our brand by being discerning about the quality of our offering, and those standards aren’t changing because technology is evolving. When a user creates something with our AI tools, the output is grounded in work done by our design team and carries the vision and stylistic intention of a professional. We guide the experience so that the results meet the quality people expect from Paperless Post. If they don’t, we won’t put them in front of our users. As an example, we trained the first generative AI feature we launched in 2025 to mimic illustration styles curated by our design team from public domain archives so that user-generated illustrations look beautiful and intentionally art-directed.

We only use AI to solve real problems. AI can do a lot of remarkable things, but not all of them are needed. We don’t want to distract our users or spend resources on gimmicky features if they’re not actually producing a better outcome. If a user can create a better, more original, more exciting result the old-fashioned way, we believe that’s the better route. Every AI feature we build has to earn its place by making something genuinely easier or more personal for the people who use it.

Paperless Post has played a role in the lives of hundreds of millions of people over the past sixteen years. We’ve continued to grow by adapting to the times while staying true to who we are, what our users want, and the artistry behind our work. As we bring our product into the AI era, the goal is the same as it’s always been: to put the best available technology in service of self-expression, greater creativity, and more meaningful gathering.