Last month, Allison offered some great tips on setting up your gift registry. One of her suggestions was to register at national store chains to ensure that your guests will have access to the items you are hoping for. For many couples today, the traditional registry process can be impractical, limiting and impersonal. Most people who live on their own or with their significant other before marriage have already purchased many of the traditional household registry must-haves for themselves, which leaves them registering for items that they don’t necessarily need or want. I know that many couples would be thrilled to register for items that are more unique to their personal taste or even for a trip, experience or excursion that would be meaningful to them. Not only is it now possible, but easy to register for the things you REALLY want. A little website called Knack, is changing things for the future of the gift registry. Our friend Fred from knackregistry.com explains how…
I’m getting married in about a month, and my fiancé, Averell, and I have spent a lot of time thinking about how we can make our wedding reflect who we really are. It’s been fun playing around with different ideas and really discovering how we can make our wedding feel special. It’s definitely been a lot of work, but it’s well worth it! What I found to be particularly amazing was that it seemed like there were unlimited possibilities for the wedding, which in the end is only one day, that when it came to register for items we might have for the rest of our lives, we were severely constricted. We looked into a lot of different options besides the big box retailers, but nothing was quite right, so that is when I decided to leave my job at Yammer in enterprise social networking and focus on Knack full time.
I founded Knack with the goal of making registering easier, more personal, and fun for the couples and guests. It’s amazing how many things you can do to make your wedding reflect your personality as a couple but how difficult it is to do this with your registry. I didn’t understand why registering wasn’t more like regular shopping, where I could pick the products from the stores that fit my style and tastes. As I’ve gone through the process with my fiancé and introduced Knack to others, what I’ve learned is that what’s most important for couples, more than efficiency, is they want to build a registry that truly reflects their tastes, interests, and personality as a couple. Our couples have fun creating their registries without feeling restricted, and we also found that guests love that they can give something they know the couple really wants.
We know that building a registry from scratch is very daunting, so we’re really excited about our catalog, which is made up of both “typical” (i.e. KitchenAid Mixer) and “unique” (i.e. oil painting) registry items all sourced from small boutiques, artists, and artisans from across the country. Our couples love that when they choose an item from our catalog, they are supporting a small business. I know Averell and I struggled when first started our registry since we liked items from some of our friends’ registries, but there was no easy way to add items directly from other people’s registries to ours. It has been really important for us to not only make it easy for friends to share registry items ideas with each other but also very easy to add items, from anyone’s registry, from anywhere to your own.
If you want more information about Knack, take a look at our video. We are having a lot of fun building a better registry service for you, and we encourage you to check it out here or below!