Creating the Perfect Registry

The intended purpose of a wedding registry is to provide the bride and groom with the things they are going to need to start a life together and essentially survive as adults away from their parent's home. For me creating our registry was a daunting task, we didn't need anything. My fiancé and I had both lived on our own before getting married like most couples of today, so naturally, we had most things we needed to survive twice over. I had no idea what to ask for, how much was acceptable for an item to cost, and personally, I thought that asking for money was tacky.

Overwhelmed, I started doing some research. Almost all stores have registries nowadays, so you have to answer some important questions, Where do we want to register? Should it be an online only store? Is it easily accessible to all of our guests? Does it have a variety of gift options? Should we have more than one registry? How much should we put on the registry? The answers to these questions determine where you should register.

Side Note: I am not being paid by anyone for promoting these stores, I will only recommend things if I really enjoyed using them. If ever I am paid to promote anything I will indicate it as a sponsored post.

My fiancé and I sat down together to answer those questions and landed on Amazon and Zola. We chose Amazon because anyone and everyone has an Amazon account and would be able to navigate easily to our registry and let's face it, they have everything we could possibly come up with.

We chose Zola because not only do they have a fantastic registry but, they also have a free wedding website generator and planning portal. I highly recommend this site. Their planning portal is so helpful at keeping brides organized, the website templates are gorgeous, and the registry is easy to use and shows up directly on your wedding website for your guests to shop. A bonus perk is that they offer 20% off on the items that weren’t purchased by your guests after the wedding date.

After we picked which sites to use we had to start filling them up with gifts we wanted. Like I said before, I did not like the idea of asking people for money so, Zola has a great feature (that I have seen other sites adopting as well) that allows you to make funds that go specifically to what you need, like excursions on your honeymoon! For example, my husband and I chose to go to the Australia Zoo and the Great Barrier Reef during our honeymoon. We calculated out how much those adventures would cost for each of us and made funds for guests to pool money together to help us reach the total. We felt much more comfortable with this idea rather than just saying "Please give us money."

As for the dilemma of how much is too much to ask for, we found that several places allow your guests to put money towards items as "group gifts." For us, this was perfect because as I mentioned above, we already had essentials but needed some bigger items like furnishings. We both decided that furniture was too expensive to put on a registry until we noticed guests could group gift!

Bottom line is if you don't need things, use your registry as an opportunity to get things you want!

With Love,

Macy