Jessi & Eric

Since we live in a small studio apartment in New York City (we currently store some of our shoes in the laundry hamper), we figured a traditional registry would lead us to similar “creative” storage solutions. We knew our ideal registry would include a great honeymoon adventure and two charities that have personal meaning for us, and we were so happy to discover that with SimpleRegistry we could do all of this, in a one-stop shop that made it easy and fun for our guests.

SimpleRegistry’s flexibility was a huge asset for us. At the time we set up our registry, we knew we wanted to have an incredible honeymoon trip, but we had not yet chosen our destination. Thanks to SimpleRegistry, this was no problem! We created categories we knew we would need, like airfare, hotel, adventure activities, food and drinks, and relaxation. Breaking it down this way was also great because guests felt like they were giving toward more tangible experiences instead of just a general honeymoon fund. We also loved that we could personalize each gift we asked for with a quirky blurb and photo to show why that particular item or activity would have special meaning to us.

We were also really hoping to find a way to use our registry to raise funds for two charities that are important to us. A friend of ours recently started a community primary school in his home country, Uganda, and we wanted to help the school construct a rain water harvesting tank to prepare for the dry season. This school does excellent work for children who would not otherwise be enrolled in school, but the organization has no official online giving platform, so simply directing people to the organization’s website to donate was not an option. Luckily, SimpleRegistry made it easy for us to tell our friends and family about the project, collect contributions in our registry, and send the donation to the school. We could not have done this through any other site. SimpleRegistry is helping us to supply clean water to school children in Uganda!

We also used our registry page to collect donations for Dominican Republic Education and Medical Support (DREAMS), which offers service-learning trips for students to travel to the Dominican Republic to work with communities on locally-designed development projects. We have both gone on these trips, and a lot of our friends and family are involved with this organization as well, so we knew it was something that would resonate with a lot of people. But a lot of those same people also wanted to give a more traditional gift that was directly for the bride and groom.

That’s where SimpleRegistry offered the best of both worlds. Because the honeymoon activities and charities were all listed on one website, and because we could break gifts down into friendly increments of $10 or $20, many people were happy that they could give part of their gift to our honeymoon fund and part of it to the charities.

We researched many other registry sites out there, and found that SimpleRegistry really offered unparalleled versatility in the ways we could customize our registry. Some sites let you register for a honeymoon, and some sites let you create a page that lists all of the stores where you are registered. SimpleRegistry was the only one that let us customize our honeymoon fund AND add on extras like the charity donations, and anything else we could have imagined wanting as newlyweds. Plus, the transactional fee was also the lowest (and most transparently described) that we found.

We were also so excited to discover how user-friendly the site was. Given all the work that can go into planning a wedding, it was such a welcome relief to realize how easy this was to set up and share with our friends and family, and to learn how hassle-free (and fun!) it was for people to give us gifts through the registry. SimpleRegistry even makes thank you notes easier by saving all the details on each gift you receive, stored in an easy-to-access section of your SimpleRegistry account. They have really thought of everything!

SimpleRegistry gave us an opportunity to create a fun, original, and personal registry that suited our needs perfectly. We are so happy that we chose SimpleRegistry as our wedding registry site and highly recommend it to all of our friends!