We are Travis and Tina. We're planning our low-key urban wedding. These are our tales as we coordinate our celebration.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Time to Register


Travis and I weren't sure what to make of the whole registry thing. First of all, we really just want to celebrate with friends and family so we have no expectations for loads of gifts. On the other hand, we don't want to end up with 3 rice cookers (No joke! This actually happened to a friend of a friend).

We abstractly thought we knew what we'd like to round out our new home, but when we actually sat down to create a list for our registry, we were all over the place. It's actually a lot of work!

I decided to sign us up for one of Crate and Barrel's wedding registry parties. Sure, it's a great marketing tactic -- open the doors to your store early for brides- and grooms-to-be and arm them with the tools to ask everyone they know to buy presents for their registry from your store! But, frankly, we don't want our wedding to consume us too much and this seemed like an easy way to add some staples to our wish list and check this item off our to-do list.

We arrived just after 9 a.m. on Sunday a couple weeks ago. We were greeted by cheerful and helpful Crate and Barrel salespeople. The store didn't open to the public until 11 a.m. so we had two hours to browse the store with other registering couples. We checked in, received our hand held registry scanners (Travis suggested an iPhone app replace the registry scanner) and headed straight for the coffee.

That's the thing. They also had coffee, mimosas, juice and breakfast treats scattered throughout the store -- which is 3 stories! We had to amble upstairs to track down the coffee, but this allowed us to get the lay of the land. We headed back downstairs and got scanning!

The morning was actually pretty fun and helpful for us to understand what the scope of things we wanted (entertaining party trays -- no; Kitchen Aid mixer -- heck yeah). We were also able to scan things on site and then change quantities, colors or even the item itself later online.

The salespeople were also super helpful. We had a lot of questions and they helped us navigate the store and the different specs for everything.

When we were done, we uploaded our registry right there in the store. We got about half of the items on our wish list scanned at Crate and Barrel. That's pretty good for one morning!

We've set up the rest of our wish list items through a universal registry online. It feels good to have this step wrapped up (well, for the most part -- Travis has some more items he hopes to add in upcoming weeks).

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