Wedding Registry

David and I have lived together for a while, and we have a fairly established home life. We might not have a lot of stuff (like furniture), but we do have all of the items in life that we “need”. When thinking about our registry, we knew we were going to have to shift the way we think in order to come up with items that we wanted to put on our list. Over the last few months, we’ve really tried to think of items that we might not need, but that we would really truly love to have.

Neither of us are huge on asking people for things – it makes us both a little awkward. So we wanted to make sure every single item on our wedding registry was something we truly wanted. We didn’t want to add items “just because”, especially not for the purpose of bulking the list up. If our guests are going to be gracious enough to purchase gifts for us, we want them to know that we purposefully chose the items on our list, and that that item would really hold meaning for us.

Based on my research, it seemed appropriate to register for about 2 times the number of items as expected guests, where couples are considered a single guest. We estimated that we needed around 100 – 125 items on our list, and obviously in a range of price points to be as accommodating as possible.

We started by going to Williams-Sonoma, since Dave is big into cooking, and I’m big into eating! We filled out a single sheet form with our relevant information, and were given a handheld scanner to use to scan the bar codes of the items we wanted to add to the registry. It sounded like a straightforward process, but most of the items wouldn’t scan, and we had to get the store associates assistance several times to make the thing work right.

Also, at first I was really disinterested in the whole process – especially since we were looking through items that really spoke to Dave more than they did me. It wasn’t until we reached the “bar items” section that the fun kicked in for me. We found item after item that would really accentuate our bar setup at home, from a twisty spoon for garnishes to a beautiful wine decanter and aerator.

Then I started paying attention to the prices of the items I was adding – $59.99 here, $79.99 there. Granted, Williams-Sonoma isn’t a cheap store (anyone who is going to choose items for us from our registry there should know that before hand) but it still made me feel awkward again about asking people to spend that kind of money on me. I’m a pretty frugal person, I shop around for items before selecting the one I want to purchase, and I couldn’t help but feel we could get similar (or even identical) items from Amazon for a whole lot less. More on that soon.

It took us about an hour from start to finish, and we left the store with 15 items on our list. The number took me by surprise – I felt like we had added way more items than that! We knew that we would be able to make adjustments to our list online, so we figured we would browse the online offerings later that night to see if there were more things we’d like.

Our second stop was Bed Bath and Beyond. We had several people recommend setting up a registry with them, since it would let our out of town guests visit a national brand, with relatively low prices, to purchases our gifts. Plus, anything we register for that we don’t receive as a gift we can purchase at a 10% discount.

It was another simple one sheet form, and then we were sent off into the store to scan items with another handheld scanner. The scanner worked much better than the one at Williams-Sonoma, we had no trouble getting the items scanned in that we wanted. It took us longer than Williams-Sonoma, but still only about an hour and a half. At the end, the store associate printed our list for us and we found had only added 25 items! 25!! This was not boding well for our 100 – 125 item mark! Again, we decided we would browse online to see if we could add more.

Later that night we started our last registry on Amazon. We went to a friends wedding several years ago where they had an Amazon registry, and it allowed people to send the gifts straight to the couple, without the need for gift wrapping or carrying it around. We loved the ease for us (as guests), and thought that it would be great to be able to have gifts delivered to us at work or home, instead of having to put someone in charge of them the day of and try to keep track of them as they make their way back to our house.

Amazon was incredibly easy and quick to sign up with, and we were even able to indicate if we preferred gift wrap or not, which was a nice option. They also let you rank items in order of preference, which was a nice way to indicate to our guests any sort of preference, if they are having difficulty selecting an item. We knew of a few things right off the bat that we weren’t able to find at either Williams-Sonoma or Bed Bath & Beyond, and we added them straight off. We also browsed reviews and online prices for items we chose at the other two locations, and removed some items from those registries and added better choices to our Amazon one. Then, we both spent time browsing ourselves and making suggestions to the other.

As of right now, we’re still only up to 67 items… so we still have some thinking to do. I honestly would have never guessed it would be this hard to put together enough items. I’m hoping some more ideas will come to us over the next week or so, since we’ll be actively thinking about it. With the wedding just over two months away, we need to have this finished soon!